[SIGCIS-Members] SIGCIS: gender, race, working class history, imperialism....

Tue Sep 9 23:54:25 PDT 2014

I think that's a very good idea. Unfortunately I don't have time to work 
anything up at the moment, but anyone who can do so is welcome to use or 
adapt the citations and annotations below, which I put together for a 
course syllabus (full version at 
<http://www.chstm.manchester.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/hstm20282/>). 
The syllabus is for undergrads -- I haven't attempted to be thorough or 
to focus on the newest work, but have tried to favour material that's 
accessible to non-specialists.

Race and ethnicity are not well covered in my course as it stands. If 
anyone has put together a literature primer or teaching materials in 
this area, I'd be grateful to hear more.

All best
James

    Background reading on gender and IT

·Abbate, Janet, /Recoding Gender: women's changing participation in 
computing/. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2012.

Best recent introduction to gender themes, running quite quickly and 
readably through the literature on quite a wide range of situations and 
problems. The oral history interviews listed as required reading above 
were conducted as part of the project which produced this book.

·Misa, Thomas, ed, /Gender Codes: why women are leaving computing/. 
Hoboken: Wiley, 2010.

The proportion of women in the computing professions has fallen since 
the 1980s. It is falling /now/. This book asks why, focusing on cases 
from the beginnings of the field to the present, and finding answers in 
the public image of computing and the history of professionalisation. 
See in particular Marie Hicks, on the status of computer 
operators/coders in the British civil service, also available at 
[mariehicks.net/writing/GenderCodesIllus.pdf 
<http://mariehicks.net/writing/GenderCodesIllus.pdf>]. See also Tom 
Misa's concluding chapter; and Caroline Clarke Hayes on the 
practicalities of solving the problem.

Social-science research on what deters women and girls from IT education 
and professions, mostly concentrating on American cases.

·Margolis, Jane, and Allan Fisher, /Unlocking the Clubhouse: women in 
computing/. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2003.

In 1995, the percentage of women undergraduates entering the School of 
Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (one of the three famed 
centres of computer science innovation, alongside Stanford and MIT) was 
just 7%. In 2000, it was 42%, an international record. The reforms which 
caused this change were largely based on a collaboration between Allan 
Fisher, a member of the Computer Science faculty, and Jane Margolis, a 
social scientist who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews on the 
positive and negative experience of female students.

·Abbate, Janet, ed, special issue on "Women and Gender in the History of 
Computing." /IEEE Annals of the History of Computing/ 25:4 (2003).

A range of approaches to diverse cases in the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries, including some first-hand memoirs of women computer users.

·Light, Jennifer, "When computers were women," /Technology and Culture/ 
40 (1999) 455-483.

Why did women engineers and programmers disappear from the historical 
record of the ENIAC?

·Beyer, Kurt W, /Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Internet Age/. 
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.

Biography of the most influential of early female coders. Hopper was 
able to command serious respect across a long career, but, unlike her 
male colleagues, had to sacrifice the opportunities of a typical family 
life to do so.

    Background on skills and automation

Questions of skills overlap unavoidably with the questions raised in the 
gender section, as will become obvious from several of these texts...

·Ensmenger, Nathan, /The Computer Boys Take Over/. Cambridge, Mass: MIT 
Press 2010.

How industry hired and managed -- or mismanaged -- software specialists 
from the 1950s to the 1990s. Themes include professional identity, 
mistrust of subcultures, and reasons why the "computer boys" remain 
mostly "boys".

·Rochlin, Gene, /Trapped in the Net: the unanticipated consequences of 
computerization/. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

See in particular Chapter 4, "Taylorism redux". "Taylorism", or 
"Scientific Management", was a theory applied to traditional industry in 
the early twentieth century: based on precise measurement, hierarchy and 
standardisation, its results were invariably a deskilled workforce and a 
powerful management. How far can the same approach be applied with 
information technology, and what are the dangers?

·David Noble, /Forces of Production: a social history of industrial 
automation/, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Classic critical account. Noble argues that managers use automation as a 
tool to remove the power that comes with shop-floor workers' skills and 
knowledge. (What, then, happens when it's time to automate management...?)

·Thomas Haigh, "The chromium-plated tabulator: institutionalizing an 
electronic revolution, 1954-1958", /IEEE Annals of the History of 
Computing/ 23:4 (2001), 75-104.

Addresses the shift from punched-card information processing to 
electronics. Did computers simply automate existing processes? Or did 
they create something entirely new, in terms of labour roles and 
management structure?

·Taylor, Phil, and Peter Bain, "'An assembly line in the head': work and 
employee relations in the call centre", /Industrial Relations Journal/ 
30:2 (1999), 101-117.

Written not long after the call centre emerged as a major social 
phenomenon, and focuses on questions of routinisation, de-skilling and 
power relations.

·David Noble, "Technology and the commodification of higher education", 
/Monthly Review/ 53:10 (2002). Online at 
[www.monthlyreview.org/0302noble.htm 
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302noble.htm>].

Noble's expansion of his argument into a field in which you're directly 
involved: university-level teaching. Published at the height of the 
"distance learning" boom in the US.

    Background reading on information processing before computers

·Campbell-Kelly, Martin, "The Railway Clearing House and Victorian Data 
Processing" in Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed, /Information Acumen/, London: 
Routledge 1994, 51-74.

A useful companion-piece by the same author, looking at another classic 
nineteenth-century activity which needed heavy and centralised 
information processing.

·Perry, Charles, /The Victorian Post Office/, Woodbridge: Royal 
Historical Society, 1992.

Background on the institution which made the Savings Bank system possible.

·Marsden, Ben, and Crosbie Smith, /Engineering Empires: a cultural 
history of technology in nineteenth-century Britain/, Basingstoke: 
Palgrave Macmillan 2005, chapter 5: "The most gigantic electrical 
experiment", 178-225.

Global communication technologies in the nineteenth century.

·Cortada, James, /Before the Computer: IBM, Burroughs and Remington Rand 
and the Industry they Created, 1865-1956/, Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 1993.

Broader study of the general area of data-processing automation 
technologies Campbell-Kelly discusses towards the end of the paper.

·Yates, JoAnne, /Control through Communication: the rise of system in 
American management/. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1989.

More on data-processing systems, showing particularly how they related 
to US white-collar work. See particularly Chapter 2 on the main 
pre-digital technologies: letterpress, ledgers, vertical filing etc.

·Agar, Jon, /The Government Machine/, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Moving into the twentieth century, argues that information technology is 
shaped by the existing needs of systematic activities, using the case of 
the British Civil Service.

    Background reading on Babbage and Lovelace

·Babbage, Charles, /Passages from the Life of a Philosopher/. London: 
Pickering, 1994 reprint (first published 1864.)

Babbage's autobiography. Very readable, and the best possible way of 
getting an insight into this eccentric and sometimes tragic character.

·Hyman, Anthony, /Charles Babbage: pioneer of the computer/. Princeton 
University Press 1982.

Best book-length biography of Babbage.

·Swade, Doron, "The Shocking Truth about Babbage and his Calculating 
Engines." /Resurrection/, New Year 2004, 18-27; online at 
[www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res32.htm#d 
<http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res32.htm#d>]

More recent research on the role of the nineteenth-century science 
writer and populariser, Dionysius Lardner.

·Menabrea, Luigi, translated with additional notes by Ada Lovelace, 
"Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage." 
Originally published in the /Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève/, 1842; 
online transcript at [www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html 
<http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html>].

The single most influential account of the unbuilt Engine's nature and 
possibilities. Read the "Notes by the Translator" and assess Lovelace's 
contribution for yourself.

·Schaffer, Simon, "Babbage's Intelligence: calculating engines and the 
factory system." /Critical Inquiry/ 21 (1994) 203-227.

The importance of social and geographical place, setting Babbage in the 
wider context of Victorian industrialism.

·Swade, Doron, "'It will not slice a pineapple': Babbage, miracles and 
machines", in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds, /Cultural Babbage: 
technology, time and invention/. London: Faber and Faber 1996.

Babbage's historical reputation, and the role of miracles in his 
demonstrations with the model Difference Engine.

·Stein, Dorothy, /Ada: a life and a legacy./ Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 
1985.

Biography aiming to de-mythologise Ada Lovelace. Generally good on the 
peculiar position of a mathematically-inclined, socially privileged 
woman in nineteenth-century society, but beware the occasional attempt 
to apply twentieth-century psychological insights.

·Toole, Betty A, /Ada: the enchantress of numbers/. Mill Valley, Calif: 
Strawberry Press 1992.

Toole is an opponent of those (like Stein) who downplay Lovelace's 
abilities. This volume consists mostly of excerpts from Lovelace's 
letters to Babbage and others.

On 09/09/2014 11:42, geoghegb at cms.hu-berlin.de wrote:
> Hi SIGCIS,
>
> One of the surprising accusations surrounding this email nonsense was that
> SIGCIS promoted racism, gender bias, and industrial domination. I was
> curious enough to visit our website and see where we address these topics
> in the history of informatics. It seems that on
> http://www.sigcis.org/resources we have not addressed  issues like race,
> gender, sexuality, and working class history in informatics. Given the
> rich range of other resources we offer along these lines, I think a few
> subsections in these areas would be worthwhile. If the group approves of
> adding these resources, topics and authors that may be germane include
>
> 1) Gender and Computing (Hayles on the Turing Test in POSTHUMAN, Haraway
> misc., Stone on Lovelace, Light on "When Computers were Women")
> 2) A People's History of Computing (Robins & Webster on "Long History of
> the Information Revolution", Schaffer on "Babbage's Intelligence"?)
>
> If there is interest in putting something like this together and putting
> it up as resources, maybe we can bounce the email back and forth, quoting
> and amending the brief list above to quickly generate something better.
>
> Best,
> Bernard
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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