TY - GEN
T1 - Exploring Technical and Creative Posts in Online Live Coding Communities
T2 - 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP Companion 2025
AU - Payne, William
AU - Kaney, Matthew
AU - Rodrigues, Izabella
AU - Hurst, Amy
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2025/1/12
Y1 - 2025/1/12
N2 - Live coding is a performance art in which media, commonly music and video, are generated and manipulated with open-source tools. While live coding initially centered upon local meet-ups, many individuals and loosely organized groups now learn, collaborate, and share work online. This expansion of interest may offer new, informal opportunities to learn computer programming, but little is known about how releveant online forums operate. To better understand this online space, we gathered and analyzed content from 414 threads in two popular live coding forums, Tidal Club and in_thread. We found that while both communities include discussions about using and extending core programming tools, significantly more posts on Tidal Club pertain to installation difficulties, while in_thread possesses a wider culture of sharing creative artifacts. We reflect on these findings and offer suggestions for future work in understanding the motivations behind why live coders post code, how they receive help, and the extent to which informal learning in live coding forums aligns with formal computer programming and music teaching.
AB - Live coding is a performance art in which media, commonly music and video, are generated and manipulated with open-source tools. While live coding initially centered upon local meet-ups, many individuals and loosely organized groups now learn, collaborate, and share work online. This expansion of interest may offer new, informal opportunities to learn computer programming, but little is known about how releveant online forums operate. To better understand this online space, we gathered and analyzed content from 414 threads in two popular live coding forums, Tidal Club and in_thread. We found that while both communities include discussions about using and extending core programming tools, significantly more posts on Tidal Club pertain to installation difficulties, while in_thread possesses a wider culture of sharing creative artifacts. We reflect on these findings and offer suggestions for future work in understanding the motivations behind why live coders post code, how they receive help, and the extent to which informal learning in live coding forums aligns with formal computer programming and music teaching.
KW - Forums
KW - Informal Learning
KW - Live Coding
KW - Online Q&A
KW - Sonic Pi
KW - Tidal Cycles
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85216227077&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85216227077&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3688828.3699634
DO - 10.1145/3688828.3699634
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85216227077
T3 - GROUP Companion 2025 - 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
SP - 15
EP - 21
BT - GROUP Companion 2025 - 2025 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 12 January 2025 through 15 January 2025
ER -