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

[Nabeel Siddiqui]

For those interested in code as political or ideological expression and a
more detailed way that this plays out, I highly recommend Geoff Cox and
Alex McLean's *Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression*
along with some of the emerging works in critical code studies.

On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 5:16 AM, Joris van Zundert <
joris.van.zundert at huygens.knaw.nl> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>> --
>>
>> 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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