[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

Thu Aug 20 18:22:45 PDT 2015

Churman's book:  The design of inquiry Systems was a wonderful attempt to
present alternative design structures for Information Systems.   I always
felt it was appropriate to the Design of Human Communication Systems.  In
the 1975 book The Delphi Method Mitroff and I wrote a chapter on how it can
be applied to different Delphi Designs which are a form of group
communication systems.  The book is free on my website if anyone is
interested
http://is.njit.edu/turoff
there is a section of the book dealing with early attempts at human
communications on computers.

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 8:59 PM, Clarence Townsend <clarence1234 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The discussion of the various modes of academic discourse & validity is
> interesting. From my perception of the disciplines what is lacking in the
> human sciences is a  vigorous process of specificity for describing
> mistakes when using broad language like modularity & racism. There is
> little to no peer examples or reinforcement for publishing examples where
> one says I thought this was an example of modularity or racism then I
> discovered I was wrong & these are the reasons I was wrong. This then
> creates an academic culture that is stuck in narrow groves. From my view
> the "hard sciences" do a whole lot better at this. I am a semi retired
> human services administrator who was bored with academic culture that
> published "results" that were really more like "results minus the mistakes
> I don't want to talk about and my peers don't talk about either".
> An interesting character from this period of computer history was Charles
> West Churchman who got bored editing the journal Philosophy of Science &
> became a professor of business administration at UC Berkeley & dealt with
> training managers who were interacting with the business IT departments to
> ask for & use computer data. He was the editor of the journal Management
> Science for a few decades.
> Clarence Townsend Eugene Oregon
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:35 PM, Henry E Lowood <lowood at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> We are now perfectly set up for a SIGCIS seminar devoted to Hayden White
> and the notion of “historical writing.”  Which is a good thing …
>
> Henry
>
>
>
> *From:* Members [mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org
> <members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org>] *On Behalf Of *Matthew Kirschenbaum
> *Sent:* Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:58 PM
> *To:* Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
> *Cc:* Thomas Haigh; members at sigcis.org
> *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?
>
>
>
> I like what Bernard says very much.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thursday, August 20, 2015, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan <
> bernard.geoghegan at hu-berlin.de> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled
> to add something too. Tom wrote:
>
> . . .  I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies.
> There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the
> two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about
> causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously
> performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected
> things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn
> where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if
> an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?”
> His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work
> meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally
> valid.
>
> I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what
> can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic
> historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite
> important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography,
> which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone
> contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and
> so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence
> and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up
> with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about
> "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards
> that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that
> sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies,
> philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the
> messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they
> are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic
> iteration.
>
> To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with
> an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and
> he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they
> frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all
> changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In
> his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke
> down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs.
> What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race,
> and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks
> on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start
> mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there
> will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those
> relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered
> empirically? Not at all, it seems to me.   It is probably helpful that some
> folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations
> without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream
> disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major
> historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but
> instead migrate from other fields.
>
> In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a
> wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think
> historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with
> established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so
> much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).
>
> Best,
> Bernard
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very
> low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that
> characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that
> my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional
> activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book
> history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very
> comfortable in asserting the following:
>
> English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being
> right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their
> facts straight to mean.
>
> English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary
> sources and the archival record.
>
> English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes,
> that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just,
> like, your opinion anyway, man.
>
> I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in
> close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence
> of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming
> contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as
> evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social
> constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge
> sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the
> gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to
> the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary
> studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that
> the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put
> on a good show.
>
> I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little
> concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever
> shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the
> discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they
> can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.
>
>
>
> Best, Matt
>
>
>
> --
>
> Matthew Kirschenbaum
> Associate Professor of English
> Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
> (MITH)
> University of Maryland
> http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
>
>
>
> --
>
> Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
>
> Institut für Kulturwissenschaft
>
> Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
>
> Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
>
>
>
> www.bernardg.com
>
>
>
> --
>
> Matthew Kirschenbaum
> Associate Professor of English
> Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
> (MITH)
> University of Maryland
> http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion
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-- 

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do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor
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