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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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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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