Reading Code Aloud

In this article, I present reading computer source code aloud, and reflect on it together in dialogue, as a method which offers new forms of engagement with code and programming. With my peer discussion partner, we experimented with this methodology by exchanging recorded audio messages in a research project involving computational data-analysis. We discovered that abandoning the screen allowed us to de-explain, de-familiarize and de-contextualize code we had programmed, and negotiate new, shared insight of it as a cultural and situated object through re-explanation, re-familiarization, and re-contextualization of our experience of code.