[SIGCIS-Members] Diagrammatic models of human computing

Sun Apr 19 06:05:47 PDT 2015

Flowcharting  was borrowed from industrial engineering. You can find examples in textbooks of the era. Henry Leffingwell's writings on office management have some interesting diagrams that could be considered precursors to flowcharting but they were almost certainly not known to Goldstine et al.  I would suggest looking at the Log for the penn differential analyzer or the Ucla differential analyzer to see if they treated problems the same way. 

_______________
David Alan Grier 
George Washington University

Sent from my iPhone 

> On Apr 19, 2015, at 4:03 AM, Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty at mccarty.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> I'd be most grateful for pointers to very early flowcharting under any name -- esp. prior to Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann, who called flowcharts "flow diagrams", in "Planning and Coding of Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument", Part II, Vol. I (1947). This document is available for download from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Martin Campbell-Kelly, in "From Theory to Practice: The Invention of Programming, 1947-51", p. 27, says that the term is "completely original" with Goldstine and von Neumann.
> 
> Another teasing question is what flowcharting, under any name, has to do with the phrase "think out of the box". Any clues?
> 
> Yours,
> WM
> 
>> On 18/04/2015 22:58, Bjorn Westergard wrote:
>> There was some chatter about this during the Dearborn conference.
>> 
>> I'm struggling to recall where, but I've seen some "flowcharts" for
>> semi-automatic computation with single-operation IBM machines.
>> Flowcharts have a longer history in industrial engineering, which is a
>> tantalizing connection to labor history labor process theory.
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>> On Apr 18, 2015, at 5:34 PM, Paul Fishwick <metaphorz at gmail.com
>> <mailto:metaphorz at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> I recently listened to a podcast on Pickering's human-intensive computing
>>> for processing astronomical data. Here is a wiki page that contains an
>>> overview and
>>> photograph from 1890:
>>> 
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers
>>> 
>>> I am seeking diagrammatic workflow models of the types of computation
>>> that occurred
>>> under Pickering's direction, but more generally, any articles or texts
>>> that contain such
>>> diagrams for human computing. I am familiar with modern formalisms
>>> such as
>>> BPMN: http://www.bpmn.org/ in which business workflows might be
>>> formalized. I also have
>>> read Grier's excellent book:
>>> 
>>> http://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691091579/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429392009&sr=8-1&keywords=when+computers+were+human
>>> <http://www.amazon.com/When-Computers-Human-David-Grier/dp/0691091579/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429392009&sr=8-1&keywords=when+computers+were+human>
>>> 
>>> The history and cultural context is interesting to me, and most
>>> appropriate for engaging
>>> readers, however, the main end-point in this story-telling process,
>>> for me, is for people to
>>> appreciate the path toward the diagrammatic formalisms with their
>>> nodes, merges, branches, and
>>> connections.
>>> 
>>> If I need to, I can embark on a path toward creating some models with
>>> the written historical
>>> accounts as a guide, but I thought that checking here would be the
>>> best starting location in this
>>> quest for diagrammatic evidence.
>>> 
>>> -paul
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Paul Fishwick, PhD
>>> Chair, ACM SIGSIM
>>> Distinguished University Chair of Arts & Technology
>>> and Professor of Computer Science
>>> Director, Creative Automata Laboratory
>>> The University of Texas at Dallas
>>> Arts & Technology
>>> 800 West Campbell Road, AT10
>>> Richardson, TX 75080-3021
>>> Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick <http://utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick>
>>> Lab Blog: creative-automata.com <http://creative-automata.com>
>>> SIGSIM Blog: modelingforeveryone.com <http://modelingforeveryone.com>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor, Department of Digital
> Humanities, King's College London, and Digital Humanities Research
> Group, University of Western Sydney
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