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A media archaeological and discourse analysis of the convergences between programming and Asperger's syndrome

Philipp Macele
The starting point of my network project is the growing interest of IT companies in programmers with Asperger syndrome, which I want to approach in an exploratory and media archaeological manner. Thereby, the project is located at the intersection of computer science, media studies and disability studies. In qualitative interviews with programmers with AS, I intend to address the question of how – in the specific setting of programming – digital technologies are related to bodies, practices and (self) perception and how ‘dis/ability’ (e.g. through the interest of IT companies) is produced as an effect of the situation and produced medially through the use of digital assistance systems (e.g. IDEs and programming languages). In a second step, the findings of these interviews are brought together with media archaeological findings on the history of IDEs, obtained in the course of my dissertation project, to gain a better understanding of the involvement of assistance systems as assistive media in the work of programming.