[SIGCIS-Members] Unix Racism: Winner vs. McPherson

Sun Aug 23 02:16:16 PDT 2015

Dear Tom, all,

Thanks for this lucid, thoughtful, and substantiated contribution.

I would want to press you on one point: "The technology here is shaped by
culture, but it does not have politics." Is this to say that you indeed
conclude that UNIX, or OS-s in general, have no politics? Maybe I
misunderstand. Thanks for any clarification you could offer.

All the best

--Joris

On za 22 aug. 2015 at 22:17 Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org> wrote:

> Responding to two points/questions from Luke Fernandez.
>
>
>
> *> Pace Haigh's claim that it's a polemic I read it more as an invitation*
>
>
>
> Hey, it’s not my claim. McPherson writes “To push *my polemic *to its
> furthest dimensions, I would argue that to study image, narrative, and
> visuality will never be enough if we do not engage as well the nonvisual
> dimensions of code and their organization of the world. Yet to trouble *my
> own polemic*…”
>
>
>
> *> Third, I'm left with a question.  Is it really true that an essay like
> McPherson's is impractical to teach to engineers as Haigh and Ceruzzi seem
> to feel?  I would think that like say Winner's essay "Do Artifacts Have
> Politics?" it poses an important set of questions that are worth raising if
> we want to understand the relationship between politics and code.   To that
> end I'd be interested in knowing how Haigh (and others) teach this essay in
> the classroom.  What questions do they pose to the class?  And how have
> engineering majors responded to it?*
>
>
>
> Well, my teaching consists almost entirely of undergraduate systems
> analysis and project management courses with no STS content to students in
> the BS “information science and technology” program. The students are by no
> stretch of the imagination engineers, being attracted to our particular
> program in large part by the lack of programming and other challenging
> technical courses. That’s not a bad thing in itself – most IT jobs aren’t
> about programming – but it does mean they probably never heard of the UNIX
> pipe capability and are not particularly interested in coding.
>
>
>
> However I do occasionally get to teach a seminar on “Information
> Technology and Organizations” (www.tomandmaria.com/675). That attracts a
> mixture of library science students (mostly from Korea and China)
> interested to know a little about technical work and undergraduate students
> interested in a smattering of social issues. The focus is on the
> relationship of culture to IT, though this is conceptualized more in terms
> of occupational and organizational cultures than cultural studies. Last
> time I taught the course I assigned a short essay by Leon Wieseltier from
> the New York Times, on the relevance of humanities thinking in the digital
> media age, and tried to fill in the backstory of what happened to the New
> Republic. They found is very hard to read and relate to. So on a pragmatic
> level I think my students would struggle with McPherson’s language – things
> like the “leticular vision.” Not relating to the humanities, they’d
> struggle with the relevance of the DH framing. They would find the
> references to post colonialism etc. confusing. The paper assumes grounding
> in some areas of knowledge and ways of thinking that most people don’t
> share.
>
>
>
> So basically I’m not the best person to ask about teaching. However, let’s
> assume that students have no trouble understanding the paper. Here’s where
> I see it as fundamentally different to Winner’s classic paper “Do Artifacts
> have Politics.” In particular the anecdote Luke brought up:
>
>
>
> Anyone who has traveled the highways of America and has become used to the
> normal height of overpasses may well find something a little odd about some
> of the bridges over the parkways on Long Island, New York. Many of the
> overpasses are extraordinarily low, having as little as nine feet of
> clearance at the curb. Even those who happened to notice this structural
> peculiarity would not be inclined to attach any special meaning to it. In
> our accustomed way of looking at things like roads and bridges we see the
> details of form as innocuous, and seldom give them a second thought.
>
>
>
> It turns out, however, that the two hundred or so low-hanging overpasses
> on Long Island were deliberately designed to achieve a particular social
> effect. Robert Moses, the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and
> other public works from the 1920s to the 1970s in New York, had these
> overpasses built to specifications that would discourage the presence of
> buses on his parkways. According to evidence provided by Robert A. Caro in
> his biography of Moses, the reasons reflect Moses's social-class bias and
> racial prejudice. Automobile
>
> owning whites of "upper" and "comfortable middle" classes, as he called
> them, would be free to use the parkways for recreation and commuting. Poor
> people and blacks, who normally used public transit, were kept off the
> roads because the twelve-foot tall buses could not get through the
> overpasses. One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and
> low-income groups to Jones Beach, Moses's widely acclaimed public park.
> Moses made doubly sure of this result by vetoing a proposed extension of
> the Long Island Railroad to JonesBeach.8
>
>
>
> As a story in recent American political history, Robert Moses's life is
> fascinating. His dealings with mayors, governors, and presidents, and his
> careful
>
> manipulation of legislatures, banks, labor unions, the press, and public
> opinion are all matters that political scientists could study for years.
> But the most important and enduring results of his work are his
> technologies, the vast engineering projects that give New York much of its
> present form. For generations after Moses has gone and the alliances he
> forged have fallen apart, his public works, especially the highways and
> bridges he built to favor the use of the automobile over the development of
> mass transit, will continue to shape that city. Many of his monumental
> structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a
> way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time,
>
> becomes just another part of the landscape. As planner Lee Koppleman told
> Caro about the low bridges on Wantagh Parkway, "The old son-of-a-gun had
> made sure that buses would never be able to use his goddamned parkways."9
>
>
>
> So first you’ll see that Winner’s argument is far more accessibly
> presented. I’ve previously used a less well known piece of his in class,
> “Mythinformation,” and can confirm that students with no exposure to
> critical theory had no trouble understanding his argument.
>
>
>
> Second, it’s supported with a different kind of evidence. Winner is citing
> Caro’s conclusions, and Caro spent years researching his landmark
> biography. The evidence and quotes appear to point to racist intent. One
> could do research to dispute or verify aspects of the conclusion. Maybe
> Winner is misrepresenting Caro. Maybe Moses didn’t actually veto the LIRR
> extension, or did so for another reason. Maybe Koppelman had a personal
> grudge against Moses. Maybe most buses were actually only 10 feet tall and
> got through just fine, or the overpasses in question were actually at or
> above national average height. (A few years ago, T&C published a bus
> timetable to Jones Beach, which suggests at the very least that modern
> buses have been reshaped to get under the overpasses). Maybe Jones Beach
> actually attracted plenty of minorities and lower income people during the
> period in question. Whereas McPherson’s conclusion relies on nothing more
> than the general prevalence of segregation in US society. Her
> “representations” and “layerings” and “it is not too much of a stretch”es
> are not vulnerable to the same kind of challenges. I think Winner’s style
> of argument is more likely to resonate with students outside the humanities.
>
>
>
> Third, the evidence is evidence of deliberate, conscious use of a
> technology to achieve a social goal in a way that’s hidden in plain sight
> and outlives its instigator. So it’s a powerful way of introducing the idea
> of structural racism hidden in standards. Also of introducing the basic STS
> idea of mutual shaping – the bridge is shaped by racism but subsequently
> enforces racism. Jones Beach stays white, which enforces segregation, which
> reinforces racist thought.
>
>
>
> Whereas, and Bjorn Westergard, has made this point at greater length, even
> if McPherson is right that social segregation is what subconsciously
> suggest the model of processes and pipes to the designers of UNIX it’s not
> clear why this matters. It’s not clear whether she believes that this
> ambient ideology led them to an operating system design that was less
> effective than the possible alternatives. The strongest argument she could
> make, and I see no evidence for it, is that we all suffer with inefficient
> operating systems as a result of mid-century racism. Even if that’s true,
> we’re all suffering equally. In Winner’s argument, racism reproduced itself
> via concrete and steel. In McPherson’s argument, racism spawned a school of
> operating system design. The second, and most powerful, part of Winner’s
> argument has no analog here. The technology here is shaped by culture, but
> it does not have politics. It’s a very different payoff.
>
>
>
> The final difference would be in what a student might aim to do after
> reading and believing the paper. Winner would have us pay attention to the
> assumptions embedded in technologies to build bridges and code that is more
> accessible and promotes values of inclusion and diversity. McPherson wants
> humanities scholars to approach their work differently. The former would be
> an easier sell to engineering students. There’s an assumption in much of
> the humanities that because, in a Focauldian kind of way, discourses
> permeate every part of culture it follows that writing a piece of cultural
> analysis that decries neoliberalism and diagnoses racism is in itself a
> brave and effective form of political intervention. Without wishing to
> cause offence to my friends in other disciplines, I’ll just observe that
> engineers are unlikely to share this assumption.
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
> *From:* Luke Fernandez [mailto:luke.fernandez at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Friday, August 21, 2015 1:51 PM
> *To:* thaigh at computer.org
> *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?
>
>
>
> Having finally read Tara McPherson's piece (Why Are the Digital Humanities
> So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation) in the wake of
> reading this very interesting listserv thread I'm left with a couple of
> reactions // questions.
>
>
>
> First, I found much of Thomas Haigh's observations helpful.  Despite the
> fact that there are interesting parallels between mid-20th century American
> segregation and a developing modularity in computer programming there
> doesn't seem to be much historical evidence that these practices "infected"
> one another.
>
>
>
> Second, I also found Matthew Kirschenbaum's email helpful.  It may be true
> that we can't find much evidence of racism in UNIX.  But that isn't really
> ultimately what the essay is about.   Pace Haigh's claim that it's a
> polemic I read it more as an invitation to contextualize the study of
> institutions within the larger society in which they are situated.  As
> McPherson puts it:
>
>
>
> *We must develop common languages that link the study of code and culture.
> We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media
> were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of
> course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must
> incorporate race from the outset, understanding and theorizing its function
> as a ghost in the digital machine. This does not mean that we should simply
> add race to our analysis in a modular way, neatly tacking it on or building
> digital archives of racial material, but that we must understand and
> theorize the deep imbrications of race and digital technology even when our
> objects of analysis (say UNIX or search engines) seem not to be about race
> at all.*
>
>
>
> This doesn't necessarily mean that the triptych of race, class and sex can
> explain everything.  But it does mean that they are important categories of
> analysis and we shouldn't dismiss them in the study of code.  If we take
> umbrage at that invitation (as some of us have) it's worth recalling
> McPherson's reference to "patterned isolation" in the university (a term
> that I believe Veysey coined in his classic text The Emergence of the
> American University) and that we can't really explain its emergence
> comprehensively without also referencing the triptych of race, class, and
> gender politics that grew the university in the 20th century.  Contrast for
> example Veysey's study of the university against Levine's The Opening of
> the American Mind and the lesson becomes clear: Veysey's institutional
> history is a classic.  But Levine's is a worthy compliment in that it shows
> how curricular developments weren't just driven by internal bureaucracies
> or by disciplinary beliefs but were also influenced by the fact that the
> university began to cater to a much more diverse public.  So in the same
> way Levine enriched the study of the university by looking at it through
> the lens of race, class and sex, we can potentially do the same thing when
> we write histories about the development of code.  That doesn't mean that
> we can always give an affirmative answer to a question like "Is ____
> racist?"  But the question is worth posing nonetheless.
>
>
>
> Third, I'm left with a question.  Is it really true that an essay like
> McPherson's is impractical to teach to engineers as Haigh and Ceruzzi seem
> to feel?  I would think that like say Winner's essay "Do Artifacts Have
> Politics?" it poses an important set of questions that are worth raising if
> we want to understand the relationship between politics and code.   To that
> end I'd be interested in knowing how Haigh (and others) teach this essay in
> the classroom.  What questions do they pose to the class?  And how have
> engineering majors responded to it?
>
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
>
>
> Luke Fernandez
>
> lfernandez.org
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org> wrote:
>
> Hmm. I agree that it’s an interesting discussion, and one that reflects
> the increasing breadth of the SIGICS community as we have been broadening
> our participation from Ph.D. historians both into the English/DH crowd and
> into software developers. So the list is bringing together a cross-section
> of people who would otherwise be unlikely to be in conversation.
>
>
>
> The headline “Is UNIX Racist” reminds me of the journalistic maxim that
> the answer to any question posed in a headline is “no.” Otherwise they’d
> run it without he question mark. (Although the real question surely is “Is
> UNIX shaped by racism?”)
>
>
>
> More seriously, I think Kirschenbaum is right in highlighting the passage
> he does. However I find it less convincing than he does. That’s probably
> because 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.
>
>
>
> In this case the claim is that UNIX has a compartmentalized architecture
> and that so was U.S. society at mid-century. According to McPherson, it is
> “at best naïve” to think that this is a coincidence.
>
>
>
> Call me naïve, or worse, but I think it’s a coincidence. Say UNIX was not
> modular but highly integrated and centralized. Well, that clearly would
> reflect the hegemonic power of late-capitalist ideology and the domination
> of white elites. If UNIX used a system of rings and permissions for
> processes, rather than the simpler model that it adopted.  Clearly that
> would reflect rigid racial and class hierarchies in mid-century society. So
> whatever architecture UNIX had adopted, one could make an equally plausible
> case that it was shaped be ambient racism. Without having at least a
> counter factual sketch of what an OS not shaped by a racist society would
> look like I find any of these arguments unconvincing.
>
>
>
> McPherson appears to starts out with the assumption that a racial answer
> will give the deepest and best explanation and works hard to hold onto this
> faith wherever else the evidence may lead: “we must understand and theorize
> the deep imbrications of race and digital technology even when our objects
> of analysis (say UNIX or search engines) seem not to be about race at all.
> That will not be easy. In writing this essay, the logic of modularity
> continually threatened to take hold, leading me into detailed explorations
> of pipe structures or departmental structures in the university, taking me
> far from the contours of race at midcentury.”
>
>
>
> Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because of the addressing scheme of the
> process it was developed for. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because of
> the need for portability, which was unusual in operating systems of the
> period. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because this reduced the need for
> managerial coordination of the loosely coupled team working on it in the
> quasi-academic world of Bell Labs where it was to a large extent a
> volunteer project. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because that let a small
> team get more done more quickly. Remember, Unix is explicitly an
> alternative to MULTICs and the problems the project ran into with a
> different design philosophy. Maybe, if we follow McPherson into big-picture
> cultural explanations, UNIX is compartmentalized because of the lingering
> influence of “separate spheres” gender ideology and the mid-century
> exclusion for women from the workforce during the 1950s.  One can also
> connect it to the well-publicized travails of OS/360, and the interest in
> this period in developing software engineering techniques that would work
> better than the “human wave” approach chronicled by Brooks. (MULTICS fans:
> I know it did many wonderful things and has a rich technical legacy).
>
>
>
> So where I find McPherson unconvincing is in implicitly dismissing such
> explanations, to convict those who might give them credit of naivety “or
> worse.” In this respect I think the article undercuts its own agenda – a
> call to “historicize and politicize code studies” with which I very much
> agree. She wants to convince us that technical innards matter, and that we
> need to do the hard work to map social and political factors onto the
> internals of the black box – which many on this list would recognize as a
> classic STS move (though she reaches for Gramschi rather than Winner or
> MacKenzie). But she doesn’t do that. She picks one technical feature,
> doesn’t explore it in depth, and jumps straight past all the possible
> social explanations to the giant, fuzzy fact of racism in society. It’s an
> explanation that doesn’t explain, at least by the personal aesthetic
> standards I apply to scholarly arguments, which are shaped more by social
> history than cultural history or cultural studies.
>
>
>
> Ken Stauss’s reaction was not politely phrased, and we do need to keep
> discourse on this list civil. However, McPherson does describe her aim as
> polemical, and the polemicist writes with the expectation of causing
> offense. The style and content of the article are calculated to appeal to
> faculty and grad students in the humanities, and beyond that community it
> does not translate well. To be fair, any scholarly work is framed within
> the norms of a particular disciplinary community and tacitly excludes those
> outside it.
>
>
>
> What I would love to see is a paper on gender in UNIX, particularly
> masculinity. There’s the name, which surely invokes “eunuchs” (as in an
> emasculated MULTICS). Commands like “finger.” Or a paper on whether the
> libertarian philosophy that Raymond has claimed for Linux was really
> present or articulated in the original design and spread of UNIX. (I’m a
> little wary to see her quote it as evidence of “the UNIX philosophy.”) Is
> UNIX sexist? Very probably. Is UNIX homophobic, in the manner of a bromance
> movie? I’m ready to be convinced. Here’s a title for someone: “Gay Kernel
> Panic: The Uneasy Masculinities of UNIX.”
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
>
> Tom
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Members [mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] *On Behalf Of *Matthew
> Kirschenbaum
> *Sent:* Tuesday, August 18, 2015 8:43 AM
> *To:* Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP at si.edu>
> *Cc:* members at sigcis.org
>
>
> *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?
>
>
>
> This has developed into an interesting discussion, at least in so far as
> it exposes some of the disciplinary rifts and boundaries amongst the many
> different constituencies and communities claiming some purchase in the
> history of computers and computing. Like the Doubloon nailed to the mast in
> Moby Dick, here sits Tara McPherson's essay with its provocative title,
> "Why are the Digital Humanities so White?" under an even more provocative
> listserv subject line, "Is Unix racist?" Not surprising many of us feel
> compelled to weigh in.
>
> I suspect some are reading the essay through something like the following
> framework:
>
> The author, starting with a bold and perhaps overdetermined thesis, sifts
> what historical evidence she can find, comes up short, and so stumbles and
> fumbles her way toward an unsatisfying conclusion. Alas, there is no
> smoking gun to prove that UNIX developed out of overtly racist motivations
> after all, but we can still salvage a publication and an English professor
> qua digital humanist can maybe toss some red meat to students.
>
> But that's not what's going on in the essay, I don't think. Instead, I see
> the decisive passage as this one:
>
> "By drawing analogies between shifting racial and political formations and
> the emerging structures of digital computing in the late 1960s, I am not
> arguing that the programmers creating UNIX at Bell Labs and in Berkeley
> were *consciously* encoding new modes of racism and racial understanding
> into digital systems. (Indeed, many of these programmers were themselves
> left-leaning hippies, and the overlaps between the counterculture and early
> computing culture run deep, as Fred Turner has illustrated.) . . .  Nor am
> I arguing for some exact correspondence between the ways in which
> encapsulation or modularity work in computation and how they function in
> the emerging regimes of neoliberalism, governmentality, and post-Fordism.
> Rather, I am highlighting the ways in which the organization of information
> and capital in the 1960s powerfully responds—across many registers—to the
> struggles for racial justice and democracy that so categorized the United
> States at the time. . . . Computation is a primary delivery method of these
> new systems, and it seems at best naive to imagine that cultural and
> computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another." (149)
>
> The core thesis, then, is that cultural and computational constructs
> influence one another. Indeed, the very division is suspect, precisely the
> "modularity" of which McPherson speaks.
>
> Who here would seriously disagree? Which is to say, I can well imagine
> specialists in the history of Unix (or the history of American social
> relations in the 1960s) disputing this or that aspect of her subsequent
> discussion and analysis. That's called scholarly communication. But the
> kind of rhetoric some here have deployed, questioning her credentials and
> the terms of her employment? That's something else entirely. Best, Matt
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP at si.edu> wrote:
>
> Well, we know that BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College, which at the
> time was all-male and quite the macho place. Dartmouth was founded to train
> Native Americans for the Christian ministry—enough about that. It was also
> the inspiration for the movie _*Animal House*_. What this has to do with
> BASIC I have no idea, but when I think of Dartmouth BASIC, I think of John
> Belushi in the cafeteria (a scene that was totally ad-libbed by the way).
> What for me in most interesting about Dartmouth BASIC is that it was
> designed for a time-shared system, but it was adapted by the PC community
> for the Altair and other PCs. That was a radical re-definition of the
> language. For example, you could not have commands like “Peek” and “Poke”
> in Dartmouth BASIC, if you’re running it on a time-shared mainframe. You’d
> crash the system. But Peek & Poke were absolutely necessary for the
> personal computer, given the limitations of memory they had. (Also “usr.”)
> Kemeney & Kurtz did not approve of the way BASIC was modified, but it had
> to happen. Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the
> PDP-11.
>
>
>
> Are the terms “peek” and “poke” sexist? Probably, but we do know that
> among the computer companies of the 1960s, DEC was one of the most
> progressive in hiring women.
>
>
>
> As for the Is UNIX Racist discussion, I am disappointed that some of you
> use that paper in coursework. But there are so few alternatives, and the
> topic is sorely in need of further study. I talked about this at the SIG
> meeting in Dearborn. We need to address the topic in a more fundamental
> way. I recommend a recent book by a colleague of mine, Richard Paul, _*We
> Could Not Fail*_, about African-Americans who worked for NASA in southern
> NASA Centers, during the hey-day of the Space Race. Around the same time,
> IBM established a major facility in Atlanta, and the company had to remind
> the Atlanta political and real-estate establishment that its employees were
> to be treated fairly. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, Hank
> Aaron expressed some concern about the move. The issue was real. What about
> the effort by Ken Olsen at DEC and William Norriss at CDC to establish
> plants in inner city neighborhoods, in St. Paul, Boston, and Springfield,
> Mass.? What became of those plants?
>
>
>
> As I said, this topic merits serious discussion, but the UNIX paper? Maybe
> not so much.
>
>
>
> Paul Ceruzzi
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Members [mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] *On Behalf Of *Andrew
> Meade McGee
> *Sent:* Monday, August 17, 2015 8:19 PM
> *To:* Nabeel Siddiqui
> *Cc:* Sigcis
> *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?
>
>
>
> On a semi-related query, has there been much race-, gender-, or
> class-related discussion around the cultural logic or social context of the
> development or reception of BASIC?
>
>
>
> I could imagine that fitting into a larger conversation on class,
> institutions, social action, and (possibly) accusations of paternalism
> given its Sixties-era development and Dartmouth origins. Just curious -- I
> admittedly know far less than I should about the dissemination of
> programming languages.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Andrew
>
>
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> Andrew Meade McGee
> Corcoran Department of History
> University of Virginia
> PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall
> Charlottesville, VA 22904
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Nabeel Siddiqui <nasiddiqui at email.wm.edu>
> wrote:
>
> I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have
> its problems, specifically correlation vs causality.  While the article
> doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's *Cultural Logic
> of Computation* on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors
> for people to think about the world around them.  The Digital Humanities
> part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to
> the article.
>
>
>
> Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at
> Mid-Century" in *Race After the Internet*, edited by Lisa Nakamura and
> Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here:
> http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf
>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate at vt.edu> wrote:
>
> Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting
> questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly
> ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection
> between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within
> American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for
> any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles
> out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era.
> I'm curious to know what others think.
>
> "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of
> Race and Computation."
> http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29
>
> Janet
>
>
> Dr. Janet Abbate
> Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society
> Co-director, National Capital Region STS program
> Virginia Tech
> www.sts.vt.edu/ncr
> www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055
> www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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/20150823/bbbec01d/attachment-0002.htm>