Dear Colleagues, Wanted to share the news that our special issue of *IEEE Annals of the History of Computing* entitled "Automation by Design: Politics, Culture, and Landscape in an Age of Machines That Learn" came out yesterday! It is now available on IEEE Xplore and soon will be on MUSE too. Colette Perold and my historiographically-contextualizing article "Introduction to Automation by Design" is open access as are a few of the articles (IEEE Digital Library, link below as a UMN z link, and many libraries subscribe to IEEE library & or MUSE where there is complete access). Special thanks to Honghong Tinn, who joined Colette, me, and Con on our 2023 CBI Symposium of the same name. It was an interdisciplinary event (History, STS, Sociology, Media Studies...) and this issue represents select historical-oriented articles. Articles and authors are listed below. It was so wonderful to partner with tremendously gifted colleagues/friends Colette and Con on this issue and an honor for us to work with such an incredibly talented group of article authors writing cutting edge scholarship on the history of automation/"artificial intelligence"!! Many thanks to *IEEE Annals* EiC Troy Astarte for helpful guidance throughout! Happy holidays to everyone! https://z.umn.edu/AutomationbyDesign Best, Jeff Articles Introduction to Automation by Design Colette Perold and Jeffrey R. Yost 6-10 Digital Construction Comes to the Pacific Northwest: Timber and the Landscapes of Automation Megan Wiessner 11 - 23 Machinery of Ethnic Cleansing: Punched Card Machines and the 1920 Greek Population Census Christos Karampatsos; Polyxeni Malisova 24 - 37 Autocoding at Work: COBOL and the Specification of the American Office David E. Dunning 38 - 49 Governing Collaboration: Data and Work Relationships in U.K. Software for Building Design, 1970–1980 Eliza Pertigkiozoglou 50 - 62 The Legality of Logistics: On Techno-Orientalism and Geopolitics in Semiconductor Production Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal 63 - 77 Computing Racial Order Jason Ludwig 79-83 ** * * * * ** *Jeffrey Yost, Ph.D. * *Director, Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information & Culture* *Research Professor, History of Sci., Tech., Med., University of Minnesota* *Just Code: Power, Inequality and the Political Economy of IT (Johns Hopkins U. Press out in Nov. 2025 co-edited w/ Gerardo Con Diaz) <https://press.jhu.edu/books/title/12804/just-code> * *Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (MIT Press) <https://amzn.to/3gqe4R6>* *Studies in Computing and Culture book series, Johns Hopkins U. Press <https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/series/studies-computing-and-culture> *Co-Editor (w/ Con Diaz) *PI, NSF-funded CBI project "Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy."* *Blockchain & Society* <https://www.blockchainandsociety.com>* (crit. inq. essays & resources)* (Founder/Leader) *Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/interfaces> *Co-Editor-in-Chief (w/ Amanda Wick)