[SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

[Thomas Haigh]

Thanks Bernard,

Looks like the discussion is moving in a productive discussion.

Matt, I didn't mean to lead a charge of virtuous historians against the infidels of English. Why, some of my best friends are English professors. The argument I was making was basically one about the social construction of scholarly knowledge, which is something you'll find STS scholars and historians of science and technology are often quite familiar with. I was struck that some on the list found the paper in question unequivocally terrible, whereas others thought it to be good enough to assign in class and thus make it something students might pattern their own narratives after.

I do believe that these judgments reflect the aesthetic preferences of different disciplinary communities. From a broadly Latourian perspective, we are all in the business of producing texts in which claims and evidence are strung together. We learn how to do this as grad students and junior faculty, and only those who can do it very well become tenured professors. These aesthetic preferences for one or another kind of narrative become thoroughly internalized. Papers that don't follow the rules won't get published and people who don't follow the rules won't get hired.

But the rules for are different in different disciplines and sub-disciplines. That's a feature, not a bug as otherwise we wouldn't need more that one discipline. In this case the games are like American Football and Rugby. There are some familial resemblances, but moves that would win points in one context would be called as fouls in another. Of course there are a range of permitted styles within communities, and Matt himself writes with admirable cogency and clarity even from my own viewpoint.

Abundant evidence suggests that McPherson is doing a fine job when her text is evaluated by members of her own disciplinary communities. She works at a much better university than me, her chapter made it into the DH volume, it has been assigned for courses, etc. So, in all probability, was the professor who gave the talk at Penn long ago. According to the standards of other communities their arguments had gone off the rails. To use Kuhn's term, the standards for truth and excellence are incommensurable. A paper that could be published in Social Text would not be publishable in Technology and Culture, or vice versa. It's not a case of caring or not caring about getting things right or being truthful, but the most fundamental idea of STS is that standards for truth and proof are socially constructed and differ between communities and traditions. If we believe that's true of Unix and the technical communities we study then we need to eat our own dog food and admit that it's true in our own disciplines and of own work.

This is something I have become very aware of with my personal shifts of disciplinary context from computer science to history/STS to information studies. While my personal preferences are fairly clear, spending my life in a school where few of my colleagues share my assumptions about what a paper should look like, what counts as evidence, etc. has made me much more aware of the parochial nature of my own preferred traditions. McPherson would doubtless see the kind of history I enjoy reading and try to write as plodding, woefully under theorized, blind to its own class and gender privilege, etc. and by her own standards she'd be quite right. One of the nice things about SIGCIS is that we bring a diversity of scholarly traditions together, in fact a broader range than our parent society SHOT.

Best wishes,

Tom

> On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:20 PM, 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
> _______________________________________________
> 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/attachments/20150821/f0b1a2af/attachment-0002.htm>