How do computers understand information? What makes user actions decipherable for the machine? This chapter explores those concepts, looking at binary code, the 1’s and 0’s that represent the bits and bytes that make up computer programs or the data processed by the computer.
Nearly everything we interact with on a computer screen can be reduced to binary code, although most users of computers have few reasons to interact with the computer at this level. This chapter’s lets you manipulate binary data, providing an opportunity to further explore the relationship between what you seen on the screen and what is going on inside the machine.
Goals¶
By the end of this chapter you will be able to:
Calculate the value of bytes using binary addition
Explain how text and color are represented in binary
Use a hex editor to manipulate binary code
Define the relationship between the logical, physical, and conceptual facets of a digital object
Acknowledgements¶
Sections of this chapter were adapted from the “Project 1: Binary, Bits, and Basics” project materials developed by Lindsay K. Mattock for the the SLIS 5020 Computing Foundations course.
The “Binary Number Systems” and “Encoding Schema” lecture segments were adapted from the following PBS Crash Course Computer Science episodes:
Application¶
Click here for a Google Doc template with this chapter’s application problems (ND users only)