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Dear all<br>
<br>
Tom and Mark's article has given me some useful food for thought as
I finish writing a review of Padua's cartoon treatment (on which I
tend to agree with their estimation. For an unabashed jokefest, it's
remarkably historiographically acute on the re-evaluation of
Lovelace's contribution to the Analytical Engine project, as far as
it goes; she doesn't really play with the further difficulty over
whether the project overall influenced later work, though she's
quite careful to avoid encouraging the reader to assume it did). <br>
<br>
The <i>CACM</i> article's comments on Lovelace as a constructed
heroine with impossible powers chime closely with a lot of work by
historians of science, including those most concerned with real
women's opportunities and challenges in both past and present
scientific cultures. I'm reminded of Becky Higgitt's Guardian
science blog columns on the occasion of two successive Ada Lovelace
Days: <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2012/oct/16/history-science">http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2012/oct/16/history-science</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2013/oct/15/women-science-history-ada-lovelace-day">http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2013/oct/15/women-science-history-ada-lovelace-day</a><br>
<br>
It's notable that the core historianly objection to "heroine"
rhetoric in women-into-science activism is that it's both bad
history and bad advocacy, combining a limited version of a feminist
platform with a veiled denial that patriarchy really operated to
oppress. The evidence shows that, if we take the modern definition
of "doing science" as "publishing original scientific research",
then, for many time periods in many fields, there literally weren't
any women doing science, because there were formal structures which
efficiently and comprehensively stopped them from doing it. The
historian can still legitimately retrieve scientifically active
women, of course, by making a more careful evaluation of how
scientific activity really worked -- revealing, for instance, the
significance of hidden collaborators, technicians, popularisers and
educators (Lovelace's mentor Mary Somerville being a key case here).
This questioning of definitions turns out to have all sorts of wider
benefits in understanding science and scientific authority. This, I
suspect, is the main reason why those of us who have that training
get so upset when advocates simply short-cut it and insert a
modern-day female research scientist into Victorian England,
smoothing over the joins with vague appeals to "inspiration" and
"insight". <br>
<br>
I've been watching the Ada-as-angel narrative gain ground in the UK
over the past few years whilst regrettably failing to do anything
much about it, and it's notable that it's developed its own tweaked
version of the historiography. This usually makes Bruce Collier very
prominent, as a convenient villain, and tends to erase mention of
Dorothy Stein, who doesn't fit its pattern. Stein's text is notable
for being both explicitly feminist and particularly dismissive of
Lovelace's accomplishments, holding up her canonisation as
symptomatic of the confusion and tokenism that has infected the
profession. Stein is particularly compelling in showing how Lovelace
-- though possessed of wealth, aristocratic status, and automatic
celebrity -- was placed restricted by social conventions to a degree
we would consider totally extraordinary. Unfortunately, Stein also
goes in for retrospective psychological diagnosis in a style the
historical professionals will find worryingly presentist, and pushes
the case for Lovelace's mathematical ignorance further than the
evidence will safely bear (hence the detailed refutation work by
Betty Toole, which has unfortunately tended to distract attention
from the question of Lovelace's originality and influence, and
indeed of Babbage's influence). <br>
<br>
I've long been curious about the growth of the Ada myth, as
addressed in Tom and Mark's Ngram and hinted at in their footnote
'c'. Contributors to this list in the past have discussed the
twentieth-century resurrection of Babbage, which it seems was
promoted by L J Comrie and Douglas Hartree, then firmly cemented by
Vivian Bowden through Ferranti sales literature and the 1953 book <i>Faster
Than Thought</i>; it was certainly <i>Faster Than Thought </i>which
pushed Lovelace to a prominent if subordinate position in the
Babbage narrative. Bowden's work, however, does not contain the
"first programmer" claim, nor anything which it seems to me could be
easily modified into it; yet the idea must surely have taken root
somewhere in advance of 1979, when it was given (apparently quite
uncontentiously) as rationale for the naming of the DoD language.
I'm wondering, do any listmember have any concrete detail on the
spread of the characterisation? <br>
<br>
All best<br>
James<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 27/08/2015 15:34, Thomas Haigh
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:01be01d0e0d5$6bc20e40$43462ac0$@computer.org"
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<p class="MsoNormal">Hello SIGCIS,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Following our recent discussion, it’s
fitting that my new article with Mark Priestley puts a toe
into matters cultural. “Innovators Assemble” mashes up
Isaacson’s <i>The Innovators</i> and Marvel’s <i>Avengers
Assemble</i> (as the first movie is known in the UK) to
explore the reliance of popular history on superhero
narratives and the damage that does to responsible history.
Among other things, we critique his posturing as a rescuer of
forgotten women, open up some black boxes to argue that Ada
Lovelace’s famous table wasn’t actually a program, reposition
the “women of ENIAC” as hands-on operators rather than
programmers, and dive into some accounting records to reveal
that (contrary to the myth that men built hardware and women
programmed it) that ENIAC was built by forgotten blue collar
women. So it’s an odd mix of perspectives from cultural
history, labor history, and technical history.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It’s in <i>Communications of the ACM</i>,
so I’ll be interested to see how the computer science
community takes it. We’re grateful to the SIGCIS community,
including comments made by Janet Abbate during our discussion
of Isaacson’s book last year and private exchanges with Brian
Randell, Doron Swade, and Laine Nooney. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Open access, HTML at <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/9/191176-innovators-assemble/fulltext"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/9/191176-innovators-assemble/fulltext">http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/9/191176-innovators-assemble/fulltext</a></a>
(missing some figures)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Proper PDF from <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2817191.2804228&coll=portal&dl=ACM">http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2817191.2804228&coll=portal&dl=ACM</a>.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Best wishes,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tom<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<br>
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