·
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].
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.
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.
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].
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.
·
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.
·
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]
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].
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.
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 _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@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