I think that's a very good idea. Unfortunately I don't have time to work anything up at the moment, but anyone who can do so is welcome to use or adapt the citations and annotations below, which I put together for a course syllabus (full version at <http://www.chstm.manchester.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/hstm20282/>). The syllabus is for undergrads -- I haven't attempted to be thorough or to focus on the newest work, but have tried to favour material that's accessible to non-specialists. Race and ethnicity are not well covered in my course as it stands. If anyone has put together a literature primer or teaching materials in this area, I'd be grateful to hear more. All best James Background reading on gender and IT ·Abbate, Janet, /Recoding Gender: women's changing participation in computing/. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2012. Best recent introduction to gender themes, running quite quickly and readably through the literature on quite a wide range of situations and problems. The oral history interviews listed as required reading above were conducted as part of the project which produced this book. ·Misa, Thomas, ed, /Gender Codes: why women are leaving computing/. Hoboken: Wiley, 2010. The proportion of women in the computing professions has fallen since the 1980s. It is falling /now/. This book asks why, focusing on cases from the beginnings of the field to the present, and finding answers in the public image of computing and the history of professionalisation. See in particular Marie Hicks, on the status of computer operators/coders in the British civil service, also available at [mariehicks.net/writing/GenderCodesIllus.pdf <http://mariehicks.net/writing/GenderCodesIllus.pdf>]. See also Tom Misa's concluding chapter; and Caroline Clarke Hayes on the practicalities of solving the problem. Social-science research on what deters women and girls from IT education and professions, mostly concentrating on American cases. ·Margolis, Jane, and Allan Fisher, /Unlocking the Clubhouse: women in computing/. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2003. In 1995, the percentage of women undergraduates entering the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (one of the three famed centres of computer science innovation, alongside Stanford and MIT) was just 7%. In 2000, it was 42%, an international record. The reforms which caused this change were largely based on a collaboration between Allan Fisher, a member of the Computer Science faculty, and Jane Margolis, a social scientist who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews on the positive and negative experience of female students. ·Abbate, Janet, ed, special issue on "Women and Gender in the History of Computing." /IEEE Annals of the History of Computing/ 25:4 (2003). A range of approaches to diverse cases in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including some first-hand memoirs of women computer users. ·Light, Jennifer, "When computers were women," /Technology and Culture/ 40 (1999) 455-483. Why did women engineers and programmers disappear from the historical record of the ENIAC? ·Beyer, Kurt W, /Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Internet Age/. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009. Biography of the most influential of early female coders. Hopper was able to command serious respect across a long career, but, unlike her male colleagues, had to sacrifice the opportunities of a typical family life to do so. Background on skills and automation Questions of skills overlap unavoidably with the questions raised in the gender section, as will become obvious from several of these texts... ·Ensmenger, Nathan, /The Computer Boys Take Over/. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2010. How industry hired and managed -- or mismanaged -- software specialists from the 1950s to the 1990s. Themes include professional identity, mistrust of subcultures, and reasons why the "computer boys" remain mostly "boys". ·Rochlin, Gene, /Trapped in the Net: the unanticipated consequences of computerization/. Princeton: Princeton University Press. See in particular Chapter 4, "Taylorism redux". "Taylorism", or "Scientific Management", was a theory applied to traditional industry in the early twentieth century: based on precise measurement, hierarchy and standardisation, its results were invariably a deskilled workforce and a powerful management. How far can the same approach be applied with information technology, and what are the dangers? ·David Noble, /Forces of Production: a social history of industrial automation/, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Classic critical account. Noble argues that managers use automation as a tool to remove the power that comes with shop-floor workers' skills and knowledge. (What, then, happens when it's time to automate management...?) ·Thomas Haigh, "The chromium-plated tabulator: institutionalizing an electronic revolution, 1954-1958", /IEEE Annals of the History of Computing/ 23:4 (2001), 75-104. Addresses the shift from punched-card information processing to electronics. Did computers simply automate existing processes? Or did they create something entirely new, in terms of labour roles and management structure? ·Taylor, Phil, and Peter Bain, "'An assembly line in the head': work and employee relations in the call centre", /Industrial Relations Journal/ 30:2 (1999), 101-117. Written not long after the call centre emerged as a major social phenomenon, and focuses on questions of routinisation, de-skilling and power relations. ·David Noble, "Technology and the commodification of higher education", /Monthly Review/ 53:10 (2002). Online at [www.monthlyreview.org/0302noble.htm <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302noble.htm>]. Noble's expansion of his argument into a field in which you're directly involved: university-level teaching. Published at the height of the "distance learning" boom in the US. Background reading on information processing before computers ·Campbell-Kelly, Martin, "The Railway Clearing House and Victorian Data Processing" in Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed, /Information Acumen/, London: Routledge 1994, 51-74. A useful companion-piece by the same author, looking at another classic nineteenth-century activity which needed heavy and centralised information processing. ·Perry, Charles, /The Victorian Post Office/, Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1992. Background on the institution which made the Savings Bank system possible. ·Marsden, Ben, and Crosbie Smith, /Engineering Empires: a cultural history of technology in nineteenth-century Britain/, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005, chapter 5: "The most gigantic electrical experiment", 178-225. Global communication technologies in the nineteenth century. ·Cortada, James, /Before the Computer: IBM, Burroughs and Remington Rand and the Industry they Created, 1865-1956/, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Broader study of the general area of data-processing automation technologies Campbell-Kelly discusses towards the end of the paper. ·Yates, JoAnne, /Control through Communication: the rise of system in American management/. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1989. More on data-processing systems, showing particularly how they related to US white-collar work. See particularly Chapter 2 on the main pre-digital technologies: letterpress, ledgers, vertical filing etc. ·Agar, Jon, /The Government Machine/, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Moving into the twentieth century, argues that information technology is shaped by the existing needs of systematic activities, using the case of the British Civil Service. Background reading on Babbage and Lovelace ·Babbage, Charles, /Passages from the Life of a Philosopher/. London: Pickering, 1994 reprint (first published 1864.) Babbage's autobiography. Very readable, and the best possible way of getting an insight into this eccentric and sometimes tragic character. ·Hyman, Anthony, /Charles Babbage: pioneer of the computer/. Princeton University Press 1982. Best book-length biography of Babbage. ·Swade, Doron, "The Shocking Truth about Babbage and his Calculating Engines." /Resurrection/, New Year 2004, 18-27; online at [www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res32.htm#d <http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res32.htm#d>] More recent research on the role of the nineteenth-century science writer and populariser, Dionysius Lardner. ·Menabrea, Luigi, translated with additional notes by Ada Lovelace, "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage." Originally published in the /Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève/, 1842; online transcript at [www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html <http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html>]. The single most influential account of the unbuilt Engine's nature and possibilities. Read the "Notes by the Translator" and assess Lovelace's contribution for yourself. ·Schaffer, Simon, "Babbage's Intelligence: calculating engines and the factory system." /Critical Inquiry/ 21 (1994) 203-227. The importance of social and geographical place, setting Babbage in the wider context of Victorian industrialism. ·Swade, Doron, "'It will not slice a pineapple': Babbage, miracles and machines", in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds, /Cultural Babbage: technology, time and invention/. London: Faber and Faber 1996. Babbage's historical reputation, and the role of miracles in his demonstrations with the model Difference Engine. ·Stein, Dorothy, /Ada: a life and a legacy./ Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 1985. Biography aiming to de-mythologise Ada Lovelace. Generally good on the peculiar position of a mathematically-inclined, socially privileged woman in nineteenth-century society, but beware the occasional attempt to apply twentieth-century psychological insights. ·Toole, Betty A, /Ada: the enchantress of numbers/. Mill Valley, Calif: Strawberry Press 1992. Toole is an opponent of those (like Stein) who downplay Lovelace's abilities. This volume consists mostly of excerpts from Lovelace's letters to Babbage and others. On 09/09/2014 11:42, geoghegb@cms.hu-berlin.de wrote:
Hi SIGCIS,
One of the surprising accusations surrounding this email nonsense was that SIGCIS promoted racism, gender bias, and industrial domination. I was curious enough to visit our website and see where we address these topics in the history of informatics. It seems that on http://www.sigcis.org/resources we have not addressed issues like race, gender, sexuality, and working class history in informatics. Given the rich range of other resources we offer along these lines, I think a few subsections in these areas would be worthwhile. If the group approves of adding these resources, topics and authors that may be germane include
1) Gender and Computing (Hayles on the Turing Test in POSTHUMAN, Haraway misc., Stone on Lovelace, Light on "When Computers were Women") 2) A People's History of Computing (Robins & Webster on "Long History of the Information Revolution", Schaffer on "Babbage's Intelligence"?)
If there is interest in putting something like this together and putting it up as resources, maybe we can bounce the email back and forth, quoting and amending the brief list above to quickly generate something better.
Best, Bernard
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