Student exercise for my new class Data Structures and Algorithms (CSCI022)

This project is being developed into an audio walking tour. A selection from the script follows the essay.

kleemeierreyna_4275_365609_node-1_-lemon-tree-2.m4a
kleemeierreyna_4275_365611_node-3_-honnold-gate-2.m4a
mininabigail_8792_365623_orange-trees-node-3.m4a

Establishing my Cherokee citizenship in 2022 has reshaped my worldview and pedagogical approach at Scripps College. This personal transformation inspired me to infuse my "Data Structures and Algorithms" class with indigenous concepts, moving beyond traditional computer science to explore the connections between technology, tradition, and the land.

I devised a class project that marries the Computer Science concept of linked lists with a physical and narrative exploration of our campus. By identifying places like the northeast corner of the ceramics building and Honnold Gate as nodes in a dynamic system, students gain insight into how the community engages with their campus. This hands-on exploration brings the abstract principles of data structures to life and reflects my journey towards Cherokee citizenship—melding my narrative and indigenous principles into the learning experience.

We talked about how cultures make narratives to interpret their world, drawing parallels between linked lists and Aboriginal songlines. This collision highlights the importance of storytelling and the ways landscapes are imbued with meaning. Local evidence is seen in curiosities like Pomona’s clock tower’s unique chimes. Such parallels encourage students to view computer science through an interdisciplinary lens and enrich their understanding of both subjects.

Songlines

Complex and ancient, songlines are teachings: ancestors’ explanations, instructions for ceremonies, cultural memory. Songlines also contain socioenvironmental history from deep time: knowledge of landscapes, plants, and animals; instructions and laws formed by the ancestors and embodied in the Dreaming, the Indigenous cosmology that Palyku legal scholar Ambelin Kwaymullina describes as the “ongoing creation of all that is . . . the ever-moving web of relationships that . . . recognizes familial relationships with all forms of life.”

Linked List Songline Walk

A linked list is a linear data structure made of connected nodes. Each node contains data and a pointer to the next node in the list. Each node has only one link. Common operations associated with linked lists include traversal, insertion, deletion, searching, sorting, and reversal.

A songline is a narrative path across land. The songlines come from the indigenous people of Australia where they use songlines to mark routes through country. The whole epic is called The Dreaming. Songlines make connections between individuals and their ancestral lands, and they carry detailed geographical, religious, and cultural information. The people traverse songlines to perform all life’s activities like singing, dancing, getting married, exchanging ideas, and settling territorial disputes. The songlines functioned as a memory palace and spatial alphabet for nomadic tribes, allowing them to navigate the continent. They transformed natural spaces into encoded cultural landscapes: an oral atlas of geography + mythology encoded hand-in-hand.

Each place in a songline is a node containing significant cultural data tied to that place, and the pointer that connects this node to the next will be a narrative of some kind: a reflection, a description, or a story. Today’s activity makes linked lists into songlines.

Lab activity

Work with one or two students in groups no larger than three. Start at the prescribed node then listen to the audio to start traversing the list. Stop the audio to perform the activities described in the text. Usually:

Describe this place. Do you have any memories here? What’s happening here now?

Please record your answers with a smartphone and submit the recordings with your lab. Trade off with your lab partners. Sketch down your final linked list (nodes and next pointers including head and tail) indicating your changes.

TRAVERSE THE LIST

The audio will take you from node to node. Answer the questions either by recording video or including the answers in your documentation. Insert a node somewhere along the way.

INSERT A NODE

1. Break one node’s Next pointer and replace it.
2. Replace the Next pointer with one of your own like the others. Include a description of the place, a memory or two, describe what you see, and reflect on more general themes (songlines, native land, a conversation or a memory—whatever comes to mind).
3. Describe the new node and connect it to the next node in the list.

Script selection

V1

This is the northeast corner of the ceramics building east of Lang Hall on the path to Harvey Mudd College. Come back in a few months to see the vine flowering. It should be very spectacular this year.

V2

My name is Ari and we are outside of the Scripps Ceramics building right now. Some birds are flying overhead. We just ran into a friend of mine who is a sophomore at Scripps walking down the path.

V3

This is Abby. And I have a memory here. Once when I wanted a quiet place to study I was with a friend and we didn't feel like going to the library because it would be too crowded. So we actually went up into one of the art studios and it was really nice and very quiet and peaceful.

V1

Did you hear the clock tower? Start walking towards it. Maybe you know why it chimes at 47 minutes past the hour?

Every culture develops myths, origin stories, rituals, and other narratives as a way to make meaning of the world around them. The songlines trace ancestral journeys while singing the land into being. They imbue the landscape with meaningful forms. Does the next pointer in a linked list resemble a songline? We can draw some parallels. If each site in the songline is a node that contains some cultural data or significance. The narrative that connects one site to the following site are pointers that point to the nodes in the linked list data structure.

We are traversing a linked list now arriving at the next node which is Honnold Gate.

V4

Honnold gate is something that I used to walk through in one of my first semesters on campus when I took clinical neuropsychology in the Steele hall I remember not knowing where I was going the very first week of class.

V1

Follow the two women through the gate. Is there a bird singing in the tree straight ahead? Go ahead and step up the bench to the lawn and head for that orange tree.

The first people arrived in what is now Claremont out at the Great Basin area of southern Oregon and Nevada around 1500 BCE. One million people lived in what we now call California, and about 5 ,000 descendants of the Tachik people lived in the basin. They shared an old language with the Ute, the Aztecs, Hopi, Papago, and Pima. This linguistic connection itself tells a story about the distances people crossed to find a home.

V5

This is Kate. We're here at the Orange Trees on Scripps College campus. And my memory of this lovely location is going to the matriculation dance every year because the first year I lived here I was a freshman and the second year I lived here I worked for Res Life, so I was here early. The third year I also worked for Res Life and I was here early and I went to the matriculation dance right here amidst these lovely orange trees. It was great.