[SIGCIS-Members] Innovators Assemble: Ada Lovelace, Walter Isaacson, and the Superheroines of Computing

[Thomas Haigh]

Hello SIGCIS,

 

Following our recent discussion, it's fitting that my new article with Mark
Priestley puts a toe into matters cultural. "Innovators Assemble" mashes up
Isaacson's The Innovators and Marvel's Avengers Assemble (as the first movie
is known in the UK) to explore the reliance of popular history on superhero
narratives and the damage that does to responsible history. Among other
things, we critique his posturing as a rescuer of forgotten women, open up
some black boxes to argue that Ada Lovelace's famous table wasn't actually a
program, reposition the "women of ENIAC" as hands-on operators rather than
programmers, and dive into some accounting records to reveal that (contrary
to the myth that men built hardware and women programmed it) that ENIAC was
built by forgotten blue collar women. So it's an odd mix of perspectives
from cultural history, labor history, and technical history.

 

It's in Communications of the ACM, so I'll be interested to see how the
computer science community takes it. We're grateful to the SIGCIS community,
including comments made by Janet Abbate during our discussion of Isaacson's
book last year and private exchanges with Brian Randell, Doron Swade, and
Laine Nooney. 

 

Open access, HTML at
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/9/191176-innovators-assemble/fulltext
(missing some figures)

Proper PDF from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2817191.2804228
<http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2817191.2804228&coll=portal&dl=ACM>
&coll=portal&dl=ACM.  

 

Best wishes,

 

Tom

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