Annette Vee is an American rhetoric and composition scholar at the University of Pittsburgh whose work examines the relationship between writing and coding as parallel literacy practices.
Core ideas
- Coding as literacy: Vee argues that computer programming is becoming a literacy — a socially organized symbolic system that mediates power, access, and participation — in the way that alphabetic writing became one over centuries. This isn’t a metaphor: coding and writing share structural features (symbolic systems, learned through practice, tied to institutional power) and historical trajectories (from elite specialization to mass participation) [@vee2017].
- Literacy as infrastructure: literacy isn’t just an individual skill but an infrastructure — a sociotechnical system that shapes who can participate in what activities. This framing connects writing studies to infrastructure studies and challenges purely skills-based approaches to both writing and coding instruction.
- Historical parallels: Vee traces how writing, numeracy, and coding each moved from specialized elite practice to widespread expectation, arguing that understanding these historical patterns helps us navigate the current expansion of computational literacy.
Notable works
- Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing (2017)
Related
- rhetoric and composition — the discipline Vee’s work extends into digital contexts
- genre — Vee’s work raises questions about whether code constitutes a genre or a literacy
- discourse community — programming communities function as discourse communities with their own conventions