October 2014 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Flagging mistakes and citing memories
by Thomas Haigh 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

Hello Jeremy, That is a good question, and something that history students tend to pick up on a craft basis. Here are some of my personal practices. I don't claim that they are authoritative, but they are within the mainstream. When presenting quote from an oral history or memoir I always introduce it in the text as "X later recalled that," "Towards the end of her life, Y claimed that," or "Decades later, Z told me that." I try to do that every single time I take a quote, fact, date, or detail from an oral history unless I have been able to independently verify it from original documents. That may seem clunky, but oral histories are very much less reliable on factual detail than primary sources and I believe the reader deserves to know the difference without having to dig in a footnote. Particularly if the footnote lumps together multiple sources so the reader can't be sure which information is from a later memory. That's one of the things popular histories don't do. For example, Isaacson has a passage where he says that during the 1945 preparation of the "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" Eckert and Mauchly asked "why von Neumann seemed to be preparing a paper based on ideas that others had helped to develop," to which Goldstine replied that the First Draft was JvN "just trying to get these things clear in his own mind." If I was writing the passage I would make sure that reader knew if this allegation and the reassurance were quoted from letters written at the time or from a memory recorded many years later after a hugely divisive decades legal struggle with Eckert and Mauchly lost. I'd also make it clear whose memory it was. If Goldstine reported this then I'd view it very differently from if Mauchly said it. This is not something I'd flag as an error, just a difference in craft between scholars and journalists, but I think it's illustrative of why readers (and historical subjects) deserve some flagging of where quotes and claims come from. How to deal with errors? That depends on how prevalent and important they are. For example, I mentioned in passing in an earlier message that Isaacson says the ENIAC ran its first calculations for Los Alamos in October 1945. He probably got that date from Jean Bartik's memoir, which makes the same error but is basically in the same category as an oral history. She's remembering things years later, but not doing any archival research to check the details. Sources like that are good for personalities and color but terrible for dates. When we make final revisions to our ENIAC book I don't think we need to mention either error as the correct date is still more commonly given. Also as we reference the ENIAC service log book and Isaacson and Bartik don't reference anything it should be clear to readers which is the more reliable claim. We don't want to come up as pedants cluttering our text with attacks on everyone who ever got anything wrong about ENIAC. (I still wish Isaacson had bothered to check though, as a lot of people will read his book). Here's an example of an error we did need to deal with in the text. In his classic book _The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann_, Herman Goldstine gave September 16, 1948 as the date when ENIAC first ran a program in its new EDVAC-like programming mode. Goldstine checked a lot of dates and details in his book, and his wife Adele Goldstine was one of the people who planned the conversion. The actual date was 30 March 1948 for a test program (or 17 April for a useful one). People who love arguing about "firsts" care about the difference between September and March because the Manchester Baby ran its first program in June 1948. We care about it because if Goldstine was right then hundreds of details in our book wouldn't make sense. So we mention that error in the text, as it's a consequential one for our own story and Goldstine's mistake has been widely repeated. For example, as of now, it is still wrong on the Wikipedia page for ENIAC. The error also played a part in how the history of ENIAC has been understood over the decades. To his credit, Isaacson got that date right, though he immediately spoiled things by crediting ENIAC with an imaginary delay line memory. There are other errors which deserve to be flagged in a footnote but not to clutter the text. One example of that: the back cover and online description of Bartik's memoir claimed that "In 1946, Bartik headed up a team that modified the ENIAC into the first stored-program electronic computer." I had some doubts about the usefulness of the "first stored program computer claim" and our own account demonstrates that "headed up" is an exaggeration. We did not bother to dispute those in our book -- people have their own opinions and our readers can judge. On the other hand 1946 is clearly the wrong year, even with reference to the book's own text. People might reasonably expect Bartik to be an authority on her own career, so we acknowledge the discrepancy in a footnote and I also mentioned it in an interesting exchange with Tim Bartik, her son, who believes that his mother's memory was infallible. I notice that the press has updated the online description to say 1947 rather than 1946, so this exchange actually did some good. Finally there are differences in interpretation with other scholars. These may deserve to be made explicitly, and help to explain why your new history changes our understanding of history and makes us see things quite differently from the work of professors A, B, and C. The different interpretations may rest on what you believe are errors or omissions in their readings of sources, but differences in interpretation are often more important and less clear cut than factual mistakes. Best wishes, Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy C. Reed Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2014 10:19 AM To: members(a)sigcis.org Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] how to document history mistakes? (was Re: Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing) On Wed, 8 Oct 2014, Mike Willegal wrote: > 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. For the book I am authoring, I started keeping track of mistakes, such as wrong dates and misspelled names, in my sources, including from previous "history" articles and books and my own interviews. I have found only around 20 mistakes. In some cases, I have found that my interviewees have misstated facts and dates (in most cases from the events they personally participated in the 1970s and 1980s). I have gone back to the interview subjects with my other cited facts and they have agreed with me, but they state that they don't remember. Some of the mistakes are in the contemporary documents (such as misspelled surnames in court documents) or history papers having wrong dates or misarranged chronologies (such as saying some software was invented after it was shipped) even when only a couple years removed from the events. Do you have any advice on how to document history mistakes, so later researchers don't hit the same issues -- or so later historians don't follow the wrong path? Some ideas I have considered are to add footnotes or comments to my bibliography that explain that the cited source or even sources misspelled some name or stated a wrong date and then explain briefly where the correct or assumed correct details came from. I don't think I want to explain about the mistakes in the content itself as it will be distracting. A different type of mistake is where someone acknowledges someone more significantly than they deserve or maybe more than the recipient believes. In other words, taking more credit and giving more credit than is due. For example, for over 30 years, for a software technology, various "stories", corresponding release notes, and histories said a developer had invented the work. When I interviewed him, he told me he didn't know why the developer who really did the good work gave him the credit but he wanted me to be clear in my work that the other person was the proponent and key inventor behind the technology. I wasn't able to interview the other person, but since my contact did fully partipate in this software technology, I plan to use his version of the story. Explaining about the different versions of the story may be distracting in my book. (But also thinking about it from another view -- maybe both of them wanted to credit the other.) For what it is worth, the person who documented the credit is well known for acknowledging many others in his detailed software release notes, interviews, and documentation. It has been very useful for me to find others to interview -- but in many cases, they told me their work was insignificant. I guess some people like to give credit to many others for their own work, which may cause mistakes in history. How do you document history mistakes? Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{' _______________________________________________ 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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nothing to see here, please move along...
by Nathan Ensmenger 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

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/

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Reminder: Things you post to this list are archived and public
by Thomas Haigh 09 Oct '14

09 Oct '14

Dear SIGCIS members, SIGCIS recently received a request from Prof. Janet Browne at Harvard to take down from our "blog" two recent "posts" alleging plagiarism. She feels that they are no longer needed as the situation is "now resolved," with no evidence found of plagiarism in either case as everything was done in accordance with the genre norms of "highbrow journalism." I have explained to her that this is an umoderated listserv, not an edited blog, and that SIGCIS has no editorial role. We have never had such a request before, and the SIGCIS EC is currently exploring its policy implications. However I do want to give you a reminder that everything posted to members(a)sigcis.org goes immediately and without moderation to more than 350 people around the world, and that all messages are permanently archived and open to the public. This is in contrast to a blog, or a threaded discussion board where posts can be edited and deleted. So before you "reply all" just take a second to think about what you are doing and who might read it. After you click "send" it's going to be up there on the interweb forever. You will also notice additional text pointing out that opinions expressed are not those of SIGCIS appearing at the bottom of each new message. Best wishes, Tom

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Computing history in India
by dave.walden.family＠gmail.com 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

A few years ago Prof. V. Rajaraman wrote a history of computing in India as a member of tne IEEE Computer Society History Committee. I announced it to this list at the time. Now he has written down some more of his memories about Indian computing. I have posted a copy at > http://computer.org/comphistory/pubs/2014-09-rajaraman.pdf The original monograph is a little ways down the page at http://computer.org/comphistory/

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for upcoming SIGCIS meeting: tips on presenting
by Paul N. Edwards 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

All, as we prepare for the upcoming SIGCIS/SHOT meeting, I thought the following might be of use to this group. The unfortunate fact is that many historians are terrible presenters, due to an inherited tradition of read-aloud style talks. In the age of TED talks, SXSW, and Pecha Kucha, that style should be long dead, yet it lingers on like a zombie, feasting on the brains of graduate students (often infected by their professors). To try to change that culture, around 15 years ago I wrote a pamphlet on “How to Give an Academic Talk.” Having just endured yet another presenter who stared at the podium while reading aloud a paper he had written for publication — occasionally casting a wild-eyed glance at the upper left corner of the room, by way of pretending to actual communication with the audience —I updated that little pamphlet again, now on v5.2. Let’s build a better presentation culture. Most other fields have already done it. So can we, and historians of computing should be in the forefront. Best, Paul ___________________________ Paul N. Edwards Professor of Information and History, University of Michigan A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010) Terse replies are deliberate (and better than nothing) University of Michigan School of Information 4437 North Quad 105 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285 (734) 764-2617 (office) (206) 337-1523 (fax) pne.people.si.umich.edu

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Isaacson thinks Jean Bartik contributed to the 1945 "First Draft" EDVAC design
by Thomas Haigh 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hello everyone, I've had a chance to read carefully through chapters 2 and 3 on Isaacson, on the invention of the computer and the origin of programming. One striking thing is how detailed much of this narrative is, and how many obscure Annals papers he cites. So it is clear that he has done a lot of reading and digging into secondary sources. For a mass market book it's unusual even have endnotes, and certainly (to make sure that nobody confuses to two recent discussion threads) I see no reason for concern over plagiarism. He is interested in some very traditional, very detailed questions on the history of early electronic computing. In particular in assigning credit between the various inventors of early machines. Although he cites a lot of our work he presents his own interpretations of who did what, what was the true "first computer," etc. So there are many pages on ENIAC, the ABC, the "First Draft" and those other traditional topics. The book is more nuanced in some areas than the things he says in interviews, and much of it is clearly written and strikes me as accurate. It's precisely because he has spent so much time with our work, and presented his book with the apparatus of scholarly research, that I am startled to see that he got so many things wrong. I counted 32 things in those two chapters that struck me as errors or misleading assertions, from the claim that ENIAC was never used to calculate tables to the idea that its initial program run from December 1945 onwards (which he dates to October) disproved Teller's design for a hydrogen bomb. Most of those are minor things. Here's the big one. In returning to these old questions of invention and credit, Isaacson naturally has to address one of the thorniest questions of all: how did thinking on computer design evolve between January 1944, at which point Eckert and Mauchly were already speculating about post-ENIAC computer designs and storage mechanisms, and April 1945 when Goldstine's received from von Neumann the "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC." We know that von Neumann started to work with the ENIAC team in August 1944, and that the "First Draft" was the first statement of the key ideas behind modern computers. The extent to which von Neumann created those ideas versus stealing the existing work of the ENAIC team has been much debated. The problem historians face is that the participants spent the next few decades on opposing sides of a long and bitter lawsuit, making oral histories and memoirs more than usually problematic. Primary sources are very thin for that whole period - a few letters, the sketchy minutes of four meetings in early 1945, von Neumann's travel plans, and some technical disclosures by Eckert and Mauchly of ideas on memory technologies and a disk or drum calculator. A careful look at the meeting minutes tells one mostly about what had not been settled on (like the dog that didn't bark). They don't mention instruction sets, record disagreement on some basic architectural options, and are focused mostly on memory technology. This, at the least, keeps the door open for one to conclude that von Neumann designed the proposed EDVAC instruction on his own while away from the Moore School and that he had an important solo role in compressing a range of options under consideration during the Moore School meetings into a coherent architecture of radical simplicity. Isaacson described the Spring 1945 meetings between von Neumann and the ENIAC team in far more detail than any previous account. He does mention the minutes, which is impressive as they are rather obscure. However, his main source on what was discussed and how they were conducted is the recently published memoir of Jean Bartik. Isaacson uses some lengthy quotes from her to show that von Neumann led detailed discussion of a proposed instruction set but welcomed the input of others, including Bartik who made a technical point that he ultimately accepted. That fits Isaacson's interests in rescuing "forgotten" women and to celebrating the collaborative nature of innovation. The problem: Bartik was not at those meetings. She had just begun training as a human computer but was not yet part of the ENIAC team. Her quotations describe an entirely set of meetings, held in Princeton three years later with an almost entirely different group of people. Those meetings were to define an instruction set for ENAIC once it was converted to the EDVAC-mode of programming I like to call the "modern code paradigm." It's clear from her narrative that these meetings are taking place in 1947 so this is a very odd mistake to make. That's the biggest and strangest error I noticed, and I expect it will jump out at any reader with a reasonable knowledge of the history of 1940s computing. I also formed the distinct impression that Isaacson, despite spending quite a few pages on the "stored program concept" and the first stored program computer, does not really understand it (pardonable) or have his book read carefully by anyone who did (less pardonable). The traditional reading of "stored program" is that an externally programmed machine like the Harvard Mark I fetches and executes instructions one at a time from a paper tape or other external medium. A stored program computer like EDSAC or EDVAC loads the whole program into memory (i.e. stores it) before beginning execution, which allows jumps etc. within the code sequence. The phrase has been burdened with many other meanings, but that's the core. In a section headed "Stored Programs" Isaacson introduces the stored program idea by writing that "as early as the beginning of 1944, Mauchly and Eckert realized that there was a good way to make computers more easily reprogrammable: store the programs inside the computer's memory rather than load them in every time." In that framework a computer with a hard drive or ROM is "stored program," but a computer like EDSAC where the program is read into memory from paper tape before being run would not be. A separate statement on the Harvard Mark I also suggests that he imagines that computer loaded a program from tape rather than executing a individual instructions from tape: "Even though the paper tape was useful in reprogramming the computer it was necessary to switch tapes manually every time there was a call for a subroutine". Best wishes, Tom

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Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing
by Thomas Haigh 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hello everyone, I just came across Isaacson's Acknowledgements page, which gives an insight into how he could do a lot of reading yet still produce a book with so many glaring mistakes (at least in its treatment of ENIAC). He mentions interviewing about 50 famous and mostly tech-related people - the Bill Joys, Al Gores, and John Negropontes of the world. He mentions advice from some other people, mostly famous journalists. He mentions that "Raul Mehta at the University of Chicago and Danny Z. Wilson at Harvard read an early draft to fix and math or engineering mistakes." The other guy who read the whole draft and "made extensive comments" was Strobe Talbot of the Brookings Institute and former foreign policy official. Talbott provided some amazing comments, and Isaacson has "kept every set of his detailed notes as a testament to his wisdom and generosity." Isaacson also "crowdsourced" some parts of the book by posting them for comment on Medium, soliciting "comments and corrections from thousands of people I didn't know." These are now deleted, but apparently were the more recent parts - AOL, The Well, etc. He got hundreds of emails and found the process very useful. One notable absence from the list: anyone with specialist expertise in the history of computing. (John Hollar of the computer history museum is on the list as someone who gave advice, but Hollar's background is in the media business rather than history and he's the CEO rather than a curator). Isaacson mentions that he has used Talbott as a reader ever since his book on foreign policy, The Wise Men. Finding a subject matter expert to read that book was a good idea, but perhaps repeating the process in this new area would have been wise. Historians of computing are not hard to find, and Isaacson does make some use of the publications and oral histories produced by SIGCIS members. So it's interesting that he would take as his three main fact checkers a foreign policy insider, a high school prodigy (https://www.linkedin.com/pub/rahul-mehta/61/79b/86a unless there is some other Rahul Mehta connected to the U of Chicago), and a Harvard student journalist (http://www.thecrimson.com/writer/1209919/Daniel_Z._Wilson/) When even a guy who is writing a book full of old-school history of computing anecdotes about Babbage, Zuse, ENIAC, delay lines, who invented what, etc. doesn't think it's worth reaching out to us to anyone in the SIGCIS community to see if he got his facts straight that says something rather dispiriting about popular history, our collective success in winning recognition for our expertise, or both. Best wishes, Tom

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Reminder: SIGCIS has a "digest" function for one-a-day messages
by Thomas Haigh 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hello SIGCIS Members, Usually our members list is quiet. Occasionally it jumps into life, and you might not want discussion of obscure topics to dominate your inbox. No need to unsubscribe. Our management system allows list mail to be dispatched in a once a day digest format. Just log in at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members (you should receive an email every month reminding you of your login details and subscription options) and change the format to digest. Best wishes, Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] historians & journalists/erasure & credit/Medina & Mills
by Sharon Traweek 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

Hi I am grateful to Nathan Ensmenger for bringing this horrible erasure of two colleagues' work by two others who should have learned better. [Both Morosov & Nasser seem to have active careers as journalists, so I presume we will see more erasures from them.] I was impressed by the example of the twitter campaign to get credit for Mara Mills from Atlantic; the same should be done for Eden Medina to get credit from the New Yorker. In the meantime see below for more information about the work of Eden Medina and Mara Mills. Cordially, Sharon Traweek, UCLA * Eden Medina [MIT PhD 2005; BS Princeton], Informatics and Computing, Indiana University http://www.indiana.edu/~histweb/faculty/Display.php?Faculty_ID=69 http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/index.html Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile [MIT, 2011] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries * Mara Mills [PhD Harvard; MA/BA UCSC], Media, Culture, & Communication, NYU Access her publications etc at http://maramills.org/publications/ "...She is completing a book (On the Phone: Deafness and Communication Engineering) on the significance of phonetics and deaf education to the emergence of "communication engineering" in early twentieth-century telephony; this concept and set of practices later gave rise to information theory, digital coding, and cybernetics. Her second book project, Print Disability and New Reading Formats, examines the reformatting of print over the course of the past century by blind and other print disabled readers, with a focus on Talking Books and electronic reading machines. ..." http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Mara_Mills ________________________________________ From: members-bounces(a)sigcis.org [members-bounces(a)sigcis.org] on behalf of Nathan Ensmenger [nensmeng(a)indiana.edu] Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2014 10:30 AM To: sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] historians and journalists It has been interesting to follow this discussion about the Issacson book (which I have not yet read) and the larger questions it raises about the relationship between the popular and academic history of computing. There is an aspect of this relationship that has come up several times in the past few weeks that I think it would be useful for all of us to be aware of, and it has to do with the misuse of academic scholarship by popular historians/journalists. The New Yorker has just published a piece by Evgeny Morosov on “The Socialist origins of Big Data,” which describes the Cybersyn project in 1970s Chile. As you might know, Project Cybersyn was the subject of my colleague Eden Medina’s prize-winning book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. In fact, the Morozov article is essentially a retelling of Eden’s story — with an almost complete lack of attribution. There is a single sentence acknowledging her book, but the rest of the piece is presented as if it were Morozov’s own research. I hesitate to link to the piece, but here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine This is the second time in as many weeks that a major publication has plagiarized the work of academic historians of science and technology. The Atlantic recently published a piece on an extraordinary visit by Helen Keller with the MIT cybernetician Norbert Weiner. A fascinating story — and one which was drawn entirely from the work of Mara Mills. The original article included only a single sentence about Mara, and then only in seeming support of the author’s conclusions. The fact that all of the original research was Mara’s went unmentioned. In response to a Twitter-based outcry, the Atlantic piece was substantially revised to recognize Mara’s essential contributions, although no acknowledgement of or apology for the original “mistake” has been made. Lest you think that either example of misappropriation was the result of a well-meaning but uninformed journalist, note the Morozov is currently a PhD student in the history of science at Harvard, and Latif Nasser, the author of the Atlantic piece, is a graduate of that program. What makes the Atlantic incident particularly egregious is that the Atlantic has been actively soliciting submissions from historians of science and technology. While that in theory is a good thing for our discipline, in practice it is clear that they are just as likely to steal your material as publish it. Many of us have had experience spending a lot of time and energy talking to journalists and then being eliminated from the resulting article. I had my work plagiarized by the Washington Post in an incident that ended up being the subject of a self-serving editorial “apology” by the WaPo ombudsman. (See “Who stole the Computer Girls? http://thecomputerboys.com/?p=289) It was a frustrating and very stressful experience. I no longer talk to journalists about my research. Two take-home lessons for us as academic historians: 1) No journalist has the ability to guarantee that you will be correctly attributed in an article. Editors can and will remove citations, references, and call-outs in the interest of making the article “more readable.” They will defend this practice as being legitimate, despite the fact that if one of our students submitted such an article, we would fail them immediately. 2) The only way to change this situation is to publicly call out the offenders. The Atlantic piece was only changed as a result of a Twitter outcry — and even then only after most readers had already seen the original unattributed piece and then moved on to other things. If you are active on social media, make your presence known. I say all of this somewhat reluctantly. I have always been interested in engaging with a broader public. Like Paul, I even worked on a Hollywood development project (think Mad Men in the late 1960s computer industry). But it is clear that there are dangers to doing so. I am not suggesting that Issacson is guilty of misappropriating sources. But I also think that as a community we need to engage critically with work’s like his, and in doing so, be careful to constantly acknowledge and highlight the contributions of scholarly historians. -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. 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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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] historians and journalists
by Nathan Ensmenger 08 Oct '14

08 Oct '14

It has been interesting to follow this discussion about the Issacson book (which I have not yet read) and the larger questions it raises about the relationship between the popular and academic history of computing. There is an aspect of this relationship that has come up several times in the past few weeks that I think it would be useful for all of us to be aware of, and it has to do with the misuse of academic scholarship by popular historians/journalists. The New Yorker has just published a piece by Evgeny Morosov on “The Socialist origins of Big Data,” which describes the Cybersyn project in 1970s Chile. As you might know, Project Cybersyn was the subject of my colleague Eden Medina’s prize-winning book Cybernetic Revolutionaries. In fact, the Morozov article is essentially a retelling of Eden’s story — with an almost complete lack of attribution. There is a single sentence acknowledging her book, but the rest of the piece is presented as if it were Morozov’s own research. I hesitate to link to the piece, but here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine This is the second time in as many weeks that a major publication has plagiarized the work of academic historians of science and technology. The Atlantic recently published a piece on an extraordinary visit by Helen Keller with the MIT cybernetician Norbert Weiner. A fascinating story — and one which was drawn entirely from the work of Mara Mills. The original article included only a single sentence about Mara, and then only in seeming support of the author’s conclusions. The fact that all of the original research was Mara’s went unmentioned. In response to a Twitter-based outcry, the Atlantic piece was substantially revised to recognize Mara’s essential contributions, although no acknowledgement of or apology for the original “mistake” has been made. Lest you think that either example of misappropriation was the result of a well-meaning but uninformed journalist, note the Morozov is currently a PhD student in the history of science at Harvard, and Latif Nasser, the author of the Atlantic piece, is a graduate of that program. What makes the Atlantic incident particularly egregious is that the Atlantic has been actively soliciting submissions from historians of science and technology. While that in theory is a good thing for our discipline, in practice it is clear that they are just as likely to steal your material as publish it. Many of us have had experience spending a lot of time and energy talking to journalists and then being eliminated from the resulting article. I had my work plagiarized by the Washington Post in an incident that ended up being the subject of a self-serving editorial “apology” by the WaPo ombudsman. (See “Who stole the Computer Girls? http://thecomputerboys.com/?p=289) It was a frustrating and very stressful experience. I no longer talk to journalists about my research. Two take-home lessons for us as academic historians: 1) No journalist has the ability to guarantee that you will be correctly attributed in an article. Editors can and will remove citations, references, and call-outs in the interest of making the article “more readable.” They will defend this practice as being legitimate, despite the fact that if one of our students submitted such an article, we would fail them immediately. 2) The only way to change this situation is to publicly call out the offenders. The Atlantic piece was only changed as a result of a Twitter outcry — and even then only after most readers had already seen the original unattributed piece and then moved on to other things. If you are active on social media, make your presence known. I say all of this somewhat reluctantly. I have always been interested in engaging with a broader public. Like Paul, I even worked on a Hollywood development project (think Mad Men in the late 1960s computer industry). But it is clear that there are dangers to doing so. I am not suggesting that Issacson is guilty of misappropriating sources. But I also think that as a community we need to engage critically with work’s like his, and in doing so, be careful to constantly acknowledge and highlight the contributions of scholarly historians. -Nathan — Nathan Ensmenger Associate Professor of Informatics School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University, Bloomington homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/

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