October 2014 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Apropos of our discussions on Isaacson and sourcing
by M. Hicks 11 Oct '14

11 Oct '14

Apropos of our discussions on Isaacson, there's a story in the SF Chronicle today that discusses this trend of popularizing accounts of women in tech history. I was glad to see Janet Abbate is quoted several times. I spoke to the reporter too, but unfortunately I am misquoted at one point as saying that the ENIAC women never wrote their own stories. Ugh. Oh well--just another cautionary tale about the circuitous path history takes from academia to popular culture. And a reminder that if you see someone quoted as saying something odd or incorrect, there's a good chance they didn't say it :) http://m.sfgate.com/business/article/Women-are-claiming-their-place-in-tech… Best, Marie ______________________ Marie Hicks, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, History of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA mariehicks.net | mhicks1(a)iit.edu | @histoftech

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historians and journalists
by Browne, Janet 11 Oct '14

11 Oct '14

I am responding to a recent post by Nathan Ensmenger relating to the improper use of scholarly work in magazine and journal review articles. I fully sympathise with Nathan’s unhappy experiences with the Washington Post. However, as examples of his personal case, Nathan takes two commentary pieces written by my colleagues at Harvard, Evgeny Morozov and Latif Nasser, both of whom have a deep commitment to making our field more widely understood beyond the academy. I would like to clarify that the history of science department at Harvard is completely scrupulous—exacting-- in what it expects from its faculty, graduates, and students when working in any media. It seems to me that both authors here are writing within the confines of the specific genre of commentary—neither the Atlantic nor New Yorker run scholarly essay reviews as we know them. Both authors immediately went to their editors to say that one sector of their readership was unhappy with the way the narratives unfolded. Latif Nasser quickly adjusted his piece in the Atlantic Monthly to make absolutely clear that this is Mara Mills' story. Evgeny Morozov has also explained on Tumblr how he independently researched and wrote his commentary on big data for the New Yorker, which then went through the fact-checking process for which the New Yorker is justly famed. I can confirm that several pages of his piece, including comments on Eden Medina’s book, were cut for space reasons. We in the close-knit community along Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge are united in applauding the excellence of Eden's book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. The book won the Computer History Museum book prize in 2013 and the 2012 Edelstein Prize from SHOT. It is well-written and very engaging. I hope that SHOT readers will remain confident in the proper practices of our fellow scholars and continue to share their work with the larger public. Our readership is depressingly small as it is. Janet Browne, Chair (and new member of the list), History of Science Department, Harvard University.

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An Unresolved Issue: Evgeny Morozov, The New Yorker, and the Perils of "Highbrow Journalism"
by Lee Vinsel 11 Oct '14

11 Oct '14

Dear SIGCIS Members, The Medina-Morozov situation continued to bother me, so I decided to write something about it. If you want me to remove reference to you or add such a reference (in cases where I write things like "One historian . . .), please let me know. Also please let me know if I have said anything inaccurate or even if you disagree with my argument. I believe that the kinds of arguments I make in this post can be right or wrong, and if I find that I have been wrong I will both make corrections and apologize publicly via the same venue. https://lee-vinsel.squarespace.com/blog/2014/10/11/an-unresolved-issue-evge… Sincerely, Lee -- Assistant Professor Program on Science and Technology Studies College of Arts and Letters Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, NJ 07030 AmericanScience.Blogspot.com Twitter: @STS_News

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Rush Limbaugh on Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
by McMillan, William W 10 Oct '14

10 Oct '14

Actually, it's about what the MS CEO had to say there. The piece's headline is, "Microsoft CEO Steps In It, Says Women Shouldn't Ask for a Raise." http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/10/10/microsoft_ceo_steps_in_it_says… or http://tinyurl.com/raisesforwomen Grace Hopper, Computing, Women in Computing.... nothing misses Rush's sharp eye. This field becomes more visible every day! Bill

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Schedule now posted for SIGCIS Workshop, Nov 9 2014
by Andrew Russell 10 Oct '14

10 Oct '14

Colleagues - We are happy to announce that the schedule is now posted for the SIGCIS 2014 Workshop, “Computing the Big Picture: Situating Information Technology in Broader Historical Narratives.” The workshop will take place on Sunday, November 9 in Dearborn, Michigan, at the tail end of the annual meeting of our parent organization, the Society for the History of Technology. http://www.sigcis.org/workshop14 This year we have our largest-ever program - 23 papers! - and we are very fortunate to have MIT Professor Jennifer S. Light kick off the day with “Computing and the Big Picture: A Keynote Conversation.” Given the dynamism of the 23 papers on our program and recent traffic on the SIGCIS mailing list, we can anticipate quite a lively conversation! Another highlight of the program is that, for the second year running, we will join the IEEE History Committee and other SHOT SIGs for lunch. As always, if you plan to join us in Dearborn you must register for SHOT and pay the associated registration fees: see http://www.historyoftechnology.org/features/annual_meeting/ for details. As is our custom, we will have an informal dinner (pay your own way) on Sunday evening. If you plan to join us for dinner, please let me know so that I (and the staff of a local restaurant) can plan accordingly. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing many of you in Dearborn, Andy Russell 2014 SIGCIS Workshop Chair

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COBOL history
by Burtgrad＠aol.com 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

As a practitioner, not a historian, I can't debate the details of the creation of COBOL. But I joined Bob Bemer's group in IBM's Data Processing Division in February, 1960 (Roy Goldfinger was part of that group). IBM had designed COMTRAN as the counterpart of FORTRAN and planned to make the language available for use by any manufacturer or user company just as it had with FORTRAN. The IBM people felt that COMTRAN was a consistent language and was superior to COBOL and continued to plan to implement COMTRAN compilers in 1960. But, as I recall, the pressure from DoD particularly was too strong and therefore IBM made a marketing decision to drop COMTRAN and only support COBOL, in spite of what IBM perceived as its deficiencies. I was not privy to the debates within the CODASYL committee, only to what I heard from Bob Bemer and Roy Goldfinger (and other members of Bemer's team), about how the final decisions were made,,,but I had a strong impression that the other manufacturers (Univac, RCA, Honeywell and others) were not willing to have IBM be the "owner" of the commercial language as it was of the scientific language. There is no doubt in my mind that Grace Hopper believed that COBOL was principally based on her work at Univac (she is quoted in many interviews to that effect including at least one on the Computer History Museum website) and, barring any forensic analysis that provesd otherwise, I expect that is as close to the truth as we will get now that so many of the CODASYL participants have died and probably have not left detailed records of the committee deliberations. Burt Grad

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re SIGCIS commentaries on New Yorker & Atlantic articles
by Sharon Traweek 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

Hi I support and admire the SHOT SIGCIS postings by Nathan Ensmeger, Tom Haigh, and others, about the Morozov/Nasser articles; I already have used some of their comments and those of others as a "teaching moment" with my current/former grad students/postdocs. I also will teach in the future about these issues, as Paul Edwards mentioned he will be doing. Of course, most of us are increasingly concerned with our public engagements as scholars and many of us teach about that responsibility. During the last few days I have asked some of my colleagues * how we should respond if our own current/former grad students/postdocs were to engage in public engagement practices similar to those used by Morozov/Nasser, and * what new efforts we should launch with these latest erasures/appropriations of scholarly work without appropriate credit, while we continue to deal with the intellectual, social, economic, cultural, and historiographical distortions generated by the erasures of many people's work in histories of technology and science. Sincerely, Sharon Traweek, Gender Studies, UCLA

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] nothing to see here, please move along...
by Subramanian, Ramesh Prof. 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

Thanks, Nathan! As I'd mentioned earlier, I had posted a brief note on this at the Yale ISP Fellows mail list, and this topic has generated quite a spirited back and forth. I am still waiting to see more legal arguments about this. If you permit, I'd be interested in posting your latest to the ISP mail list. Regards, -Ramesh ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ramesh Subramanian, Ph.D. Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Computer Information Systems Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518. Phone: 203-582-5276 Email: ramesh.subramanian(a)quinnipiac.edu Web: Ramesh Subramanian’s web page & Visiting Fellow, Information Society Project Yale Law School New Haven, CT 06511 Email: ramesh.subramanian(a)yale.edu Web: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/9841.htm Recent books: Access to Knowledge in India: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011) The Global Flow of Information: Legal, Social and Cultural Perspectives (NYU Press, 2011) "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated" Mahatma Gandhi -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Nathan Ensmenger Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2014 10:22 AM To: sigcis Subject: QU Spamtrap [Score:4.0] [SIGCIS-Members] nothing to see here, please move along... I appreciate Tom's reminder that everything one says on the Internet becomes a public and (mostly) permanent document. I am afraid that this means an end to that job offer from Harvard that I was anticipating... That being said, I also share Lee's questions about what it means that these two situations were "resolved" and whether or not such resolutions were sufficient (and who gets to decide). Do the authors in question feel that their concerns were fairly and sufficiently addressed? That seems relevant. Certainly I do not know anyone who read the original version of Atlantic piece on Helen Keller at MIT who felt that it was appropriately attributed, and the fact that when this was pointed out the article was immediately updated to comply with acceptable journalistic standards suggests that neither did the author and editors. Is this sufficient resolution? Perhaps. But even if it were, does this mean that we are no longer allowed to talk about the incident, its nature and causes, the individuals involved, or our concerns about future reoccurrences? Similarly, the fact that so many trained historians familiar with the computing and cybernetics literature failed to understand that the New Yorker piece was intended to be a book review suggests that the problem may have been with the article itself, and not with our collective interpretive abilities. A quick survey of the New Yorker website reveals several recent examples of book reviews and critic-at-large reports that are unambiguously reviews. The reviewers reference the original author(s) and work(s) early, frequently, and with enough context to make it clear whose ideas belong to whom. And again, even if a certain flexibility of attribution were the norm for certain forms of “highbrow journalism,” does that mean that we are not free to disagree and to apply our own standards of academic and intellectual integrity? I am a regular reader of the New Yorker and generally admire it --- but I do not see why their authors and editorial staff get the final word on how our research can be acceptably used and appropriated. *Cybernetic Revolutionaries* was a multiple prize winning book in the history of science and technology published by one of the top academic presses in our discipline. If the New Yorker piece treated the book with the respect that it deserves, then I clearly missed it. In this I might be mistaken (and in voicing my concerns I was almost certainly impolitic) but I do not I was egregiously out-of-line to at least raise the issue. The discussion about these particular incidents may have long ago passed the point of being productive, but I hope that the larger conversation will continue (although perhaps it would be best to do so offline, as the eyes of the world are clearly upon us). Regardless of where any of us come down on the merits of these specific cases, we should all be asking ourselves these questions: What if that were my article, or my book? Would I have felt fairly represented or acknowledged? If not, what would be an appropriate resolution? And again, who gets to decide? With that, I am ceasing-and-desisting on this issue so as to not cause anyone any additional awkwardness. -Nathan --- Nathan Ensmenger Associate Professor of Informatics School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University, Bloomington homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/ _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members(a)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://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

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Open Access Week at Columbia University--Aaron Swartz documentary free screening
by Gary Hausman 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

For those of you in the New York city area, as part of the celebrations for International Open Access Week (October 20-26, 2014) there will be a free screening (and live chat with the director, Brian Knappenberger) of *The Internet's own boy: the story of Aaron Swartz*. The film and discussion with the director will take place at 6 pm.on Thursday, October 23rd at 202 Altschul, Barnard College. All are welcome to attend -- Gary Hausman South Asian Studies Librarian Columbia University Libraries/Information Services 309 Lehman Library 420 West 118th Street New York, NY 10027

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Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing
by Mike Willegal 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

Though we are lucky enough to be able to talk to many people that experienced the events, first hand, I have found that interviews done 30, 40 or 50 years after the fact is fraught with the difficulty of people remembering exactly what happened. Many people “remember” what has been most frequently reported over the past decade or so. Researchers in Civil War history have found the same thing and are more and more relying upon contemporary evidence such as journals, newspapers and letters. regards, Mike Willegal

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