[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

Thu Aug 20 18:52:50 PDT 2015

Thanks, Bernard. As one not trained in history, but dabbling in history, I found your post to be a wonderful read.

-Ramesh

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Ramesh Subramanian, Ph.D.
Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Computer Information Systems
Quinnipiac University
Hamden, CT 06518.
Phone: 203-582-5276
Email:rameshs at quinnipiac.edu
Web: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/about/directory/faculty-detail/?Dept=16&Person=23345
&
Fellow, Yale Law School - Information Society Project
New Haven, CT 06511
Email: ramesh.subramanian at yale.edu
Web: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/9841.htm
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From: Members [members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Matthew Kirschenbaum [mkirschenbaum at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2015 6:57 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<mailto: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

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--
Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
Institut für Kulturwissenschaft
Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

www.bernardg.com<http://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