"Funding in preference to a . . . "? What does that even mean? I've taught the McPherson article on multiple occasions, and will do so again this fall. It does not suggest that UNIX is racist (though I appreciate that that's shorthand for purposes of a subject line). The article, however, is not shorthand. It always inspires a good conversation. I'd certainly hope to see a higher bar for discussion of it here, in a forum with so many scholars and historians I respect. Best, Matt On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 7:10 PM, Ken Strauss <ken.strauss@sympatico.ca> wrote:

As a hard-nosed engineer who has been active in software design for almost 50 years I find the article one of the most insignificant pieces of c*ap that I have had the misfortune to waste my time reading. Before I expound on what I **REALLY** think, the article should be condemned as a crime against defenseless bits. I find it inconceivable that intelligent readers could do other than consign it to the dung heap of irrelevance. The worst part is that I suspect that she got funding for her drivel in preference to a fourth-rate computer science student’s project.

*From:* Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] *On Behalf Of *Nabeel Siddiqui *Sent:* Monday, August 17, 2015 5:55 PM *To:* Sigcis *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have its problems, specifically correlation vs causality. While the article doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's *Cultural Logic of Computation* on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors for people to think about the world around them. The Digital Humanities part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to the article.

Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at Mid-Century" in *Race After the Internet*, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here: http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu> wrote:

Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era. I'm curious to know what others think.

"Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation." http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29

Janet

Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS

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_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

On a semi-related query, has there been much race-, gender-, or class-related discussion around the cultural logic or social context of the development or reception of BASIC? I could imagine that fitting into a larger conversation on class, institutions, social action, and (possibly) accusations of paternalism given its Sixties-era development and Dartmouth origins. Just curious -- I admittedly know far less than I should about the dissemination of programming languages. Best, Andrew -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Andrew Meade McGee Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall Charlottesville, VA 22904 On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Nabeel Siddiqui <nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu> wrote:

I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have its problems, specifically correlation vs causality. While the article doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's *Cultural Logic of Computation* on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors for people to think about the world around them. The Digital Humanities part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to the article.

Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at Mid-Century" in *Race After the Internet*, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here: http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu> wrote:

...

Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era. I'm curious to know what others think.

"Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation." http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29

Janet

Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

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Paul’s remarks encourage me to add to this discussion. In 1987 Carol Muller, who had been an undergraduate at the later co-educational Dartmouth, returned to work there after completing her doctorate at Stanford. There she ran the women in science program. She has told me that she felt that she had stepped back into a “time warp” (her words) in which Dartmouth had not internalized the social changes of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Out of this program, Muller created MentorNet, the most successful of all the mentoring at a distance programs. As some of you know, I am currently working on a trilogy of brief books for Springer’s history of computing series - on the history of broadening participation in computing - all of which I hope will appear in 2016. The second volume, on women and computing, contains the MentorNet story. The third volume addresses two aspects of race and computing: the history of higher education and of science (including computing) higher education for underrepresented minorities, and STEM and computing organizations (such as SACNAS and Coalition to Diversify Computing) focused on enhanced participation for underrepresented minorities. The first volume is a history of NSF programs related to broadening participation in computing. -Bill Aspray On Aug 18, 2015, at 8:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP@si.edu<mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu>> wrote: Well, we know that BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College, which at the time was all-male and quite the macho place. Dartmouth was founded to train Native Americans for the Christian ministry—enough about that. It was also the inspiration for the movie _Animal House_. What this has to do with BASIC I have no idea, but when I think of Dartmouth BASIC, I think of John Belushi in the cafeteria (a scene that was totally ad-libbed by the way). What for me in most interesting about Dartmouth BASIC is that it was designed for a time-shared system, but it was adapted by the PC community for the Altair and other PCs. That was a radical re-definition of the language. For example, you could not have commands like “Peek” and “Poke” in Dartmouth BASIC, if you’re running it on a time-shared mainframe. You’d crash the system. But Peek & Poke were absolutely necessary for the personal computer, given the limitations of memory they had. (Also “usr.”) Kemeney & Kurtz did not approve of the way BASIC was modified, but it had to happen. Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11. Are the terms “peek” and “poke” sexist? Probably, but we do know that among the computer companies of the 1960s, DEC was one of the most progressive in hiring women. As for the Is UNIX Racist discussion, I am disappointed that some of you use that paper in coursework. But there are so few alternatives, and the topic is sorely in need of further study. I talked about this at the SIG meeting in Dearborn. We need to address the topic in a more fundamental way. I recommend a recent book by a colleague of mine, Richard Paul, _We Could Not Fail_, about African-Americans who worked for NASA in southern NASA Centers, during the hey-day of the Space Race. Around the same time, IBM established a major facility in Atlanta, and the company had to remind the Atlanta political and real-estate establishment that its employees were to be treated fairly. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, Hank Aaron expressed some concern about the move. The issue was real. What about the effort by Ken Olsen at DEC and William Norriss at CDC to establish plants in inner city neighborhoods, in St. Paul, Boston, and Springfield, Mass.? What became of those plants? As I said, this topic merits serious discussion, but the UNIX paper? Maybe not so much. Paul Ceruzzi From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Meade McGee Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 8:19 PM To: Nabeel Siddiqui Cc: Sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist? On a semi-related query, has there been much race-, gender-, or class-related discussion around the cultural logic or social context of the development or reception of BASIC? I could imagine that fitting into a larger conversation on class, institutions, social action, and (possibly) accusations of paternalism given its Sixties-era development and Dartmouth origins. Just curious -- I admittedly know far less than I should about the dissemination of programming languages. Best, Andrew -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Andrew Meade McGee Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall Charlottesville, VA 22904 On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Nabeel Siddiqui <nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu<mailto:nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu>> wrote: I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have its problems, specifically correlation vs causality. While the article doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's Cultural Logic of Computation on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors for people to think about the world around them. The Digital Humanities part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to the article. Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at Mid-Century" in Race After the Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here: http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu<mailto:abbate@vt.edu>> wrote: Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era. I'm curious to know what others think. "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation." http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29 Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr<http://www.sts.vt.edu/ncr> www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055<http://www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055> www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS<http://www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS> _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

To add to Marie’s list, there are other sessions at SHOT that take up various themes that have come up in this thread. First, there is a roundtable at the Sunday SIGCIS workshop on "Digital Humanities, SIGCIS, and SHOT” - it’s in the 2 pm slot. Second, there is a SIGCIS-sponsored session during the main SHOT meeting (Saturday 12:45 pm slot) titled “Ordering Concepts of Information Technologies.” The session includes a paper by Craig Robertson on filing cabinets, a paper by me on modular design and Project Tinkertoy, and a paper by Dan Holbrook titled “Clean, Pure, and Orderly.” Rachel Maines will comment. Modularity was very much on our minds when we pulled the session together. FWIW, I also have written on the history of modularity (with no focus on race), published in Information & Culture, titled “Modularity: An Interdisciplinary History of An Ordering Concept.” It’s a tricky and fascinating subject to reckon with historically, to say the least. Project MUSE link here: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/libraries_and_culture/toc/lac.47.3.html; a copy is also available from my website, arussell.org<http://arussell.org>. Cheers, Andy On Aug 18, 2015, at 9:41 AM, M. Hicks <mhicks1@iit.edu<mailto:mhicks1@iit.edu>> wrote: This seems like an ideal time to give a shout out to a few papers being given at SHOT this year that deal with race and computing. There may well be more--these are just the ones I happen to know about due to having contact with the authors. On the main program: Sarah McLennan (College of William and Mary, United States) [Robinson Prize Candidate]: Computing and the Color Line: Race, Gender, and Opportunity in Early Computing at NASA Tolu Odumosu (University of Virginia, United States): Why Diversity Was Crucial to the Creation and Adoption of the GMS Standard for Mobile Communication On the SIGCIS program: Eileen Clancy (City University of New York), Abacus Computing in the Age of Electronics: Sekiko Yoshida and the Early U.S. Space Program ______________________ Marie Hicks, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, History of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA mariehicks.net<http://mariehicks.net/> | mhicks1@iit.edu<mailto:mhicks1@iit.edu> | @histoftech On Aug 18, 2015, at 9:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP@si.edu<mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu>> wrote: Well, we know that BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College, which at the time was all-male and quite the macho place. Dartmouth was founded to train Native Americans for the Christian ministry—enough about that. It was also the inspiration for the movie _Animal House_. What this has to do with BASIC I have no idea, but when I think of Dartmouth BASIC, I think of John Belushi in the cafeteria (a scene that was totally ad-libbed by the way). What for me in most interesting about Dartmouth BASIC is that it was designed for a time-shared system, but it was adapted by the PC community for the Altair and other PCs. That was a radical re-definition of the language. For example, you could not have commands like “Peek” and “Poke” in Dartmouth BASIC, if you’re running it on a time-shared mainframe. You’d crash the system. But Peek & Poke were absolutely necessary for the personal computer, given the limitations of memory they had. (Also “usr.”) Kemeney & Kurtz did not approve of the way BASIC was modified, but it had to happen. Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11. Are the terms “peek” and “poke” sexist? Probably, but we do know that among the computer companies of the 1960s, DEC was one of the most progressive in hiring women. As for the Is UNIX Racist discussion, I am disappointed that some of you use that paper in coursework. But there are so few alternatives, and the topic is sorely in need of further study. I talked about this at the SIG meeting in Dearborn. We need to address the topic in a more fundamental way. I recommend a recent book by a colleague of mine, Richard Paul, _We Could Not Fail_, about African-Americans who worked for NASA in southern NASA Centers, during the hey-day of the Space Race. Around the same time, IBM established a major facility in Atlanta, and the company had to remind the Atlanta political and real-estate establishment that its employees were to be treated fairly. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, Hank Aaron expressed some concern about the move. The issue was real. What about the effort by Ken Olsen at DEC and William Norriss at CDC to establish plants in inner city neighborhoods, in St. Paul, Boston, and Springfield, Mass.? What became of those plants? As I said, this topic merits serious discussion, but the UNIX paper? Maybe not so much. Paul Ceruzzi From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Meade McGee Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 8:19 PM To: Nabeel Siddiqui Cc: Sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist? On a semi-related query, has there been much race-, gender-, or class-related discussion around the cultural logic or social context of the development or reception of BASIC? I could imagine that fitting into a larger conversation on class, institutions, social action, and (possibly) accusations of paternalism given its Sixties-era development and Dartmouth origins. Just curious -- I admittedly know far less than I should about the dissemination of programming languages. Best, Andrew -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Andrew Meade McGee Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall Charlottesville, VA 22904 On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Nabeel Siddiqui <nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu<mailto:nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu>> wrote: I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have its problems, specifically correlation vs causality. While the article doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's Cultural Logic of Computation on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors for people to think about the world around them. The Digital Humanities part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to the article. Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at Mid-Century" in Race After the Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here: http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu<mailto:abbate@vt.edu>> wrote: Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era. I'm curious to know what others think. "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation." http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29 Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr<http://www.sts.vt.edu/ncr> www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055<http://www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055> www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS<http://www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS> _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://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 athttp://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options athttp://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://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 athttp://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options athttp://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org/>, the email discussion list ______________________ Marie Hicks, Ph.D. Asst. Professor, History of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA mariehicks.net<http://mariehicks.net/> | mhicks1@iit.edu<mailto:mhicks1@iit.edu> | @histoftech _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

Hmm. I agree that it’s an interesting discussion, and one that reflects the increasing breadth of the SIGICS community as we have been broadening our participation from Ph.D. historians both into the English/DH crowd and into software developers. So the list is bringing together a cross-section of people who would otherwise be unlikely to be in conversation. The headline “Is UNIX Racist” reminds me of the journalistic maxim that the answer to any question posed in a headline is “no.” Otherwise they’d run it without he question mark. (Although the real question surely is “Is UNIX shaped by racism?”) More seriously, I think Kirschenbaum is right in highlighting the passage he does. However I find it less convincing than he does. That’s probably because I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid. In this case the claim is that UNIX has a compartmentalized architecture and that so was U.S. society at mid-century. According to McPherson, it is “at best naïve” to think that this is a coincidence. Call me naïve, or worse, but I think it’s a coincidence. Say UNIX was not modular but highly integrated and centralized. Well, that clearly would reflect the hegemonic power of late-capitalist ideology and the domination of white elites. If UNIX used a system of rings and permissions for processes, rather than the simpler model that it adopted. Clearly that would reflect rigid racial and class hierarchies in mid-century society. So whatever architecture UNIX had adopted, one could make an equally plausible case that it was shaped be ambient racism. Without having at least a counter factual sketch of what an OS not shaped by a racist society would look like I find any of these arguments unconvincing. McPherson appears to starts out with the assumption that a racial answer will give the deepest and best explanation and works hard to hold onto this faith wherever else the evidence may lead: “we must understand and theorize the deep imbrications of race and digital technology even when our objects of analysis (say UNIX or search engines) seem not to be about race at all. That will not be easy. In writing this essay, the logic of modularity continually threatened to take hold, leading me into detailed explorations of pipe structures or departmental structures in the university, taking me far from the contours of race at midcentury.” Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because of the addressing scheme of the process it was developed for. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because of the need for portability, which was unusual in operating systems of the period. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because this reduced the need for managerial coordination of the loosely coupled team working on it in the quasi-academic world of Bell Labs where it was to a large extent a volunteer project. Maybe UNIX is compartmentalized because that let a small team get more done more quickly. Remember, Unix is explicitly an alternative to MULTICs and the problems the project ran into with a different design philosophy. Maybe, if we follow McPherson into big-picture cultural explanations, UNIX is compartmentalized because of the lingering influence of “separate spheres” gender ideology and the mid-century exclusion for women from the workforce during the 1950s. One can also connect it to the well-publicized travails of OS/360, and the interest in this period in developing software engineering techniques that would work better than the “human wave” approach chronicled by Brooks. (MULTICS fans: I know it did many wonderful things and has a rich technical legacy). So where I find McPherson unconvincing is in implicitly dismissing such explanations, to convict those who might give them credit of naivety “or worse.” In this respect I think the article undercuts its own agenda – a call to “historicize and politicize code studies” with which I very much agree. She wants to convince us that technical innards matter, and that we need to do the hard work to map social and political factors onto the internals of the black box – which many on this list would recognize as a classic STS move (though she reaches for Gramschi rather than Winner or MacKenzie). But she doesn’t do that. She picks one technical feature, doesn’t explore it in depth, and jumps straight past all the possible social explanations to the giant, fuzzy fact of racism in society. It’s an explanation that doesn’t explain, at least by the personal aesthetic standards I apply to scholarly arguments, which are shaped more by social history than cultural history or cultural studies. Ken Stauss’s reaction was not politely phrased, and we do need to keep discourse on this list civil. However, McPherson does describe her aim as polemical, and the polemicist writes with the expectation of causing offense. The style and content of the article are calculated to appeal to faculty and grad students in the humanities, and beyond that community it does not translate well. To be fair, any scholarly work is framed within the norms of a particular disciplinary community and tacitly excludes those outside it. What I would love to see is a paper on gender in UNIX, particularly masculinity. There’s the name, which surely invokes “eunuchs” (as in an emasculated MULTICS). Commands like “finger.” Or a paper on whether the libertarian philosophy that Raymond has claimed for Linux was really present or articulated in the original design and spread of UNIX. (I’m a little wary to see her quote it as evidence of “the UNIX philosophy.”) Is UNIX sexist? Very probably. Is UNIX homophobic, in the manner of a bromance movie? I’m ready to be convinced. Here’s a title for someone: “Gay Kernel Panic: The Uneasy Masculinities of UNIX.” Best wishes, Tom From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Kirschenbaum Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 8:43 AM To: Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP@si.edu> Cc: members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist? This has developed into an interesting discussion, at least in so far as it exposes some of the disciplinary rifts and boundaries amongst the many different constituencies and communities claiming some purchase in the history of computers and computing. Like the Doubloon nailed to the mast in Moby Dick, here sits Tara McPherson's essay with its provocative title, "Why are the Digital Humanities so White?" under an even more provocative listserv subject line, "Is Unix racist?" Not surprising many of us feel compelled to weigh in. I suspect some are reading the essay through something like the following framework: The author, starting with a bold and perhaps overdetermined thesis, sifts what historical evidence she can find, comes up short, and so stumbles and fumbles her way toward an unsatisfying conclusion. Alas, there is no smoking gun to prove that UNIX developed out of overtly racist motivations after all, but we can still salvage a publication and an English professor qua digital humanist can maybe toss some red meat to students. But that's not what's going on in the essay, I don't think. Instead, I see the decisive passage as this one: "By drawing analogies between shifting racial and political formations and the emerging structures of digital computing in the late 1960s, I am not arguing that the programmers creating UNIX at Bell Labs and in Berkeley were consciously encoding new modes of racism and racial understanding into digital systems. (Indeed, many of these programmers were themselves left-leaning hippies, and the overlaps between the counterculture and early computing culture run deep, as Fred Turner has illustrated.) . . . Nor am I arguing for some exact correspondence between the ways in which encapsulation or modularity work in computation and how they function in the emerging regimes of neoliberalism, governmentality, and post-Fordism. Rather, I am highlighting the ways in which the organization of information and capital in the 1960s powerfully responds—across many registers—to the struggles for racial justice and democracy that so categorized the United States at the time. . . . Computation is a primary delivery method of these new systems, and it seems at best naive to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another." (149) The core thesis, then, is that cultural and computational constructs influence one another. Indeed, the very division is suspect, precisely the "modularity" of which McPherson speaks. Who here would seriously disagree? Which is to say, I can well imagine specialists in the history of Unix (or the history of American social relations in the 1960s) disputing this or that aspect of her subsequent discussion and analysis. That's called scholarly communication. But the kind of rhetoric some here have deployed, questioning her credentials and the terms of her employment? That's something else entirely. Best, Matt On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP@si.edu <mailto:CeruzziP@si.edu> > wrote: Well, we know that BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College, which at the time was all-male and quite the macho place. Dartmouth was founded to train Native Americans for the Christian ministry—enough about that. It was also the inspiration for the movie _Animal House_. What this has to do with BASIC I have no idea, but when I think of Dartmouth BASIC, I think of John Belushi in the cafeteria (a scene that was totally ad-libbed by the way). What for me in most interesting about Dartmouth BASIC is that it was designed for a time-shared system, but it was adapted by the PC community for the Altair and other PCs. That was a radical re-definition of the language. For example, you could not have commands like “Peek” and “Poke” in Dartmouth BASIC, if you’re running it on a time-shared mainframe. You’d crash the system. But Peek & Poke were absolutely necessary for the personal computer, given the limitations of memory they had. (Also “usr.”) Kemeney & Kurtz did not approve of the way BASIC was modified, but it had to happen. Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11. Are the terms “peek” and “poke” sexist? Probably, but we do know that among the computer companies of the 1960s, DEC was one of the most progressive in hiring women. As for the Is UNIX Racist discussion, I am disappointed that some of you use that paper in coursework. But there are so few alternatives, and the topic is sorely in need of further study. I talked about this at the SIG meeting in Dearborn. We need to address the topic in a more fundamental way. I recommend a recent book by a colleague of mine, Richard Paul, _We Could Not Fail_, about African-Americans who worked for NASA in southern NASA Centers, during the hey-day of the Space Race. Around the same time, IBM established a major facility in Atlanta, and the company had to remind the Atlanta political and real-estate establishment that its employees were to be treated fairly. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, Hank Aaron expressed some concern about the move. The issue was real. What about the effort by Ken Olsen at DEC and William Norriss at CDC to establish plants in inner city neighborhoods, in St. Paul, Boston, and Springfield, Mass.? What became of those plants? As I said, this topic merits serious discussion, but the UNIX paper? Maybe not so much. Paul Ceruzzi From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org <mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> ] On Behalf Of Andrew Meade McGee Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 8:19 PM To: Nabeel Siddiqui Cc: Sigcis Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist? On a semi-related query, has there been much race-, gender-, or class-related discussion around the cultural logic or social context of the development or reception of BASIC? I could imagine that fitting into a larger conversation on class, institutions, social action, and (possibly) accusations of paternalism given its Sixties-era development and Dartmouth origins. Just curious -- I admittedly know far less than I should about the dissemination of programming languages. Best, Andrew -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Andrew Meade McGee Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall Charlottesville, VA 22904 On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Nabeel Siddiqui <nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu <mailto:nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu> > wrote: I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have its problems, specifically correlation vs causality. While the article doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's Cultural Logic of Computation on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors for people to think about the world around them. The Digital Humanities part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to the article. Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at Mid-Century" in Race After the Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here: <http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf> http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu <mailto:abbate@vt.edu> > wrote: Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era. I'm curious to know what others think. "Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation." http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29 Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr <http://www.sts.vt.edu/ncr> www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 <http://www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055> www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS <http://www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS> _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org -- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

Thanks so much for this, Tom, I totally agree. Even for those of us who have STS training, proving causality in cultural shaping of technical architectures can be difficult. In one draft of my dissertation, I made a statement about the need to understand Apple software developer culture because it shapes the way apps are designed and implemented. But my committee rightly pointed out that despite getting inside the black box of Mac and iOS programming, I didn’t actually show what I claimed aside from some tenuous connections I drew. This is inherently hard to do, doubly so for scholars from other disciplines. But I agree with Tom, for historians and sociologists, the burden of proof should be higher for claims implying causality. While McPherson’s article is an interesting conversation starter for us academics and a provocative thought piece for students, I fear that it could do more harm than good in our attempts to reach across the aisle to engineers because undoubtedly there are many more like Ken who might see the article as symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with the humanities and dismiss the lot of us.

On Aug 18, 2015, at 1:30 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote:

So where I find McPherson unconvincing is in implicitly dismissing such explanations, to convict those who might give them credit of naivety “or worse.” In this respect I think the article undercuts its own agenda – a call to “historicize and politicize code studies” with which I very much agree. She wants to convince us that technical innards matter, and that we need to do the hard work to map social and political factors onto the internals of the black box – which many on this list would recognize as a classic STS move (though she reaches for Gramschi rather than Winner or MacKenzie). But she doesn’t do that. She picks one technical feature, doesn’t explore it in depth, and jumps straight past all the possible social explanations to the giant, fuzzy fact of racism in society. It’s an explanation that doesn’t explain, at least by the personal aesthetic standards I apply to scholarly arguments, which are shaped more by social history than cultural history or cultural studies.

I just want to briefly respond to one aspect of Tom Haigh's recent and very thorough reply, without intending any special reference to the McPherson essay in particular. Tom writes:

. . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid.

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following: English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean. English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record. English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man. I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show. I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature. Best, Matt -- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

I like what Bernard says very much. On Thursday, August 20, 2015, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan < bernard.geoghegan@hu-berlin.de> wrote:

Hi All,

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled to add something too. Tom wrote:

. . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies.

...

There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid.

I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic iteration.

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, it seems to me. It is probably helpful that some folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate from other fields.

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).

Best, Bernard

...

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean.

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record.

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show.

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.

Best, Matt

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

-- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

The discussion of the various modes of academic discourse & validity is interesting. From my perception of the disciplines what is lacking in the human sciences is a vigorous process of specificity for describing mistakes when using broad language like modularity & racism. There is little to no peer examples or reinforcement for publishing examples where one says I thought this was an example of modularity or racism then I discovered I was wrong & these are the reasons I was wrong. This then creates an academic culture that is stuck in narrow groves. From my view the "hard sciences" do a whole lot better at this. I am a semi retired human services administrator who was bored with academic culture that published "results" that were really more like "results minus the mistakes I don't want to talk about and my peers don't talk about either". An interesting character from this period of computer history was Charles West Churchman who got bored editing the journal Philosophy of Science & became a professor of business administration at UC Berkeley & dealt with training managers who were interacting with the business IT departments to ask for & use computer data. He was the editor of the journal Management Science for a few decades. Clarence Townsend Eugene Oregon Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:35 PM, Henry E Lowood <lowood@stanford.edu> wrote:

We are now perfectly set up for a SIGCIS seminar devoted to Hayden White and the notion of “historical writing.” Which is a good thing … Henry

From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Kirschenbaum Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:58 PM To: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Cc: Thomas Haigh; members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

I like what Bernard says very much.

On Thursday, August 20, 2015, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan <bernard.geoghegan@hu-berlin.de> wrote: Hi All,

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled to add something too. Tom wrote: . . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid. I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic iteration.

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, it seems to me. It is probably helpful that some folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate from other fields.

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).

Best, Bernard

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean.

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record.

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show.

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.

Best, Matt

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

-- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

www.bernardg.com

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

What I enjoyed about C West Churchman was he had training in the philosophy of science but he enjoyed dealing with the nitty gritty messy problems that managers face in their day to day lives like what to do when a computer project was way over budget & not giving the manager useful info. I met Churchman just after he retired from the business school & became advisor to the Peace Studies program. Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 20, 2015, at 6:22 PM, Murray Turoff <murray.turoff@gmail.com> wrote:

Churman's book: The design of inquiry Systems was a wonderful attempt to present alternative design structures for Information Systems. I always felt it was appropriate to the Design of Human Communication Systems. In the 1975 book The Delphi Method Mitroff and I wrote a chapter on how it can be applied to different Delphi Designs which are a form of group communication systems. The book is free on my website if anyone is interested http://is.njit.edu/turoff there is a section of the book dealing with early attempts at human communications on computers.

...

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 8:59 PM, Clarence Townsend <clarence1234@gmail.com> wrote: The discussion of the various modes of academic discourse & validity is interesting. From my perception of the disciplines what is lacking in the human sciences is a vigorous process of specificity for describing mistakes when using broad language like modularity & racism. There is little to no peer examples or reinforcement for publishing examples where one says I thought this was an example of modularity or racism then I discovered I was wrong & these are the reasons I was wrong. This then creates an academic culture that is stuck in narrow groves. From my view the "hard sciences" do a whole lot better at this. I am a semi retired human services administrator who was bored with academic culture that published "results" that were really more like "results minus the mistakes I don't want to talk about and my peers don't talk about either". An interesting character from this period of computer history was Charles West Churchman who got bored editing the journal Philosophy of Science & became a professor of business administration at UC Berkeley & dealt with training managers who were interacting with the business IT departments to ask for & use computer data. He was the editor of the journal Management Science for a few decades. Clarence Townsend Eugene Oregon Sent from my iPhone

...

On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:35 PM, Henry E Lowood <lowood@stanford.edu> wrote:

We are now perfectly set up for a SIGCIS seminar devoted to Hayden White and the notion of “historical writing.” Which is a good thing …

Henry

From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Kirschenbaum Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2015 3:58 PM To: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Cc: Thomas Haigh; members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

I like what Bernard says very much.

On Thursday, August 20, 2015, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan <bernard.geoghegan@hu-berlin.de> wrote:

Hi All,

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled to add something too. Tom wrote:

. . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid.

I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic iteration.

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, it seems to me. It is probably helpful that some folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate from other fields.

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).

Best, Bernard

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean.

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record.

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show.

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.

Best, Matt

--

Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

-- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

www.bernardg.com

--

Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

-- please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com do not use @njit.edu address

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff

Thanks Bernard, Looks like the discussion is moving in a productive discussion. Matt, I didn't mean to lead a charge of virtuous historians against the infidels of English. Why, some of my best friends are English professors. The argument I was making was basically one about the social construction of scholarly knowledge, which is something you'll find STS scholars and historians of science and technology are often quite familiar with. I was struck that some on the list found the paper in question unequivocally terrible, whereas others thought it to be good enough to assign in class and thus make it something students might pattern their own narratives after. I do believe that these judgments reflect the aesthetic preferences of different disciplinary communities. From a broadly Latourian perspective, we are all in the business of producing texts in which claims and evidence are strung together. We learn how to do this as grad students and junior faculty, and only those who can do it very well become tenured professors. These aesthetic preferences for one or another kind of narrative become thoroughly internalized. Papers that don't follow the rules won't get published and people who don't follow the rules won't get hired. But the rules for are different in different disciplines and sub-disciplines. That's a feature, not a bug as otherwise we wouldn't need more that one discipline. In this case the games are like American Football and Rugby. There are some familial resemblances, but moves that would win points in one context would be called as fouls in another. Of course there are a range of permitted styles within communities, and Matt himself writes with admirable cogency and clarity even from my own viewpoint. Abundant evidence suggests that McPherson is doing a fine job when her text is evaluated by members of her own disciplinary communities. She works at a much better university than me, her chapter made it into the DH volume, it has been assigned for courses, etc. So, in all probability, was the professor who gave the talk at Penn long ago. According to the standards of other communities their arguments had gone off the rails. To use Kuhn's term, the standards for truth and excellence are incommensurable. A paper that could be published in Social Text would not be publishable in Technology and Culture, or vice versa. It's not a case of caring or not caring about getting things right or being truthful, but the most fundamental idea of STS is that standards for truth and proof are socially constructed and differ between communities and traditions. If we believe that's true of Unix and the technical communities we study then we need to eat our own dog food and admit that it's true in our own disciplines and of own work. This is something I have become very aware of with my personal shifts of disciplinary context from computer science to history/STS to information studies. While my personal preferences are fairly clear, spending my life in a school where few of my colleagues share my assumptions about what a paper should look like, what counts as evidence, etc. has made me much more aware of the parochial nature of my own preferred traditions. McPherson would doubtless see the kind of history I enjoy reading and try to write as plodding, woefully under theorized, blind to its own class and gender privilege, etc. and by her own standards she'd be quite right. One of the nice things about SIGCIS is that we bring a diversity of scholarly traditions together, in fact a broader range than our parent society SHOT. Best wishes, Tom

On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:20 PM, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan <bernard.geoghegan@hu-berlin.de> wrote:

Hi All,

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled to add something too. Tom wrote:

...

...

. . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies. There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid.

I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic iteration.

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, it seems to me. It is probably helpful that some folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate from other fields.

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).

Best, Bernard

...

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean.

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record.

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show.

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.

Best, Matt

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

-- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

www.bernardg.com _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

I've been mulling over statements like these in the McPherson paper: Another rule of UNIX is the Rule of Diversity, which insists on a mistrust

of the “one true way.” Thus UNIX, in the words of one account, “embraces multiple languages, open extensible systems and customization hooks everywhere,” reading much like a description of the tenets of neoliberal multiculturalism (Raymond, 24). Certain words emerge again and again throughout the ample literature on UNIX: modularity, compactness, simplicity, orthogonality. UNIX is meant to allow multitasking, portability, time sharing, and compartmentalizing. It is not much of a stretch to layer these traits over the core tenets of post-Fordism, a mode of production that begins to remake industrial-era notions of standardization in the 1960s: time-space compression, transformability, customization, a public/private blur, and so on.

This push toward modularity and the covert in digital computation also

reflects other changes in the organization of social life in the United States by the 1960s.

So we have several analogies between "the organization of social life" (per the standard Regulation School periodization) and the design of UNIX. But the juxtaposition does very little on its own. We're left wondering what is meant by "layer" and "reflect" above. I'm reminded of a remark in Wittgenstein's *Philosophical Investigations*: It is, of course, imaginable that two people belonging to a tribe

unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate mental accompaniments. And if we were to see it we should say they were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game—say into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of chess. Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game? What right would one have to say so?

By a suitable projection, we may "interpret" anything as a game of chess (e.g. a picture of a cloud as a bitstring could be used to choose paths in the decision tree of moves)! And likewise, we can draw an analogy between aspects of some artifact's operation and some human practice. But so what? (Cf. "Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so—why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us?") So in what sense might UNIX "[reflect]... the organization of social life"? I can imagine, for instance, a UNIX engineer watching locomotive engineers at work and arriving at a solution for a software concurrency issue. But in some instances she would *appeal* to the practice of the locomotive engineers to justify her decision, e.g.: "see, the locomotive engineers raise this flag to prevent collisions, and we can do something analogous at the operating system level to preserve [some important invariant]". In other instances she may not; it may guide her to a solution which is justified entirely differently; her inspiration is simply of no importance. Just as mathematicians seldom include a record of how they arrived at the theorem initiall in their proof. And even when the analogy it is of interest, her appeal to it could only go so far; eventually, the conversation would turn to the design imperatives of the system in question ("yes, but unlike the locomotive case, we have to deal with an arbitrary number of users..."). That is to say: the practice of the locomotive engineers does not play a *criterial* role for the software engineer by virtue of its role in helping her arrive at the solution. No one tells her that her system is flawed because it doesn't conform to existing locomotive practice! That would require a very strong analogy indeed. So if the "reflection" McPherson has in mind is meant to mean something like "inspiration", it's hard to see why this is interesting even if we grant the historical point (that they looked out upon a racist society and returned with solutions to systems programming problems). It would be very interesting if she could adduce some evidence to the effect that UNIX engineers justified their decisions by appeal to some social norm (e.g. the imperative to preserve a racial hierarchy in the workplace). But this is very difficult to imagine. On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Luke Fernandez <luke.fernandez@gmail.com> wrote:

Having finally read Tara McPherson's piece (Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation) in the wake of reading this very interesting listserv thread I'm left with a couple of reactions // questions.

First, I found much of Thomas Haigh's observations helpful. Despite the fact that there are interesting parallels between mid-20th century American segregation and a developing modularity in computer programming there doesn't seem to be much historical evidence that these practices "infected" one another.

Second, I also found Matthew Kirschenbaum's email helpful. It may be true that we can't find much evidence of racism in UNIX. But that isn't really ultimately what the essay is about. Pace Haigh's claim that it's a polemic I read it more as an invitation to contextualize the study of institutions within the larger society in which they are situated. As McPherson puts it:

*We must develop common languages that link the study of code and culture. We must historicize and politicize code studies. And, because digital media were born as much of the civil rights era as of the cold war era (and of course these eras are one and the same), our investigations must incorporate race from the outset, understanding and theorizing its function as a ghost in the digital machine. This does not mean that we should simply add race to our analysis in a modular way, neatly tacking it on or building digital archives of racial material, but that we must understand and theorize the deep imbrications of race and digital technology even when our objects of analysis (say UNIX or search engines) seem not to be about race at all.*

This doesn't necessarily mean that the triptych of race, class and sex can explain everything. But it does mean that they are important categories of analysis and we shouldn't dismiss them in the study of code. If we take umbrage at that invitation (as some of us have) it's worth recalling McPherson's reference to "patterned isolation" in the university (a term that I believe Veysey coined in his classic text The Emergence of the American University) and that we can't really explain its emergence comprehensively without also referencing the triptych of race, class, and gender politics that grew the university in the 20th century. Contrast for example Veysey's study of the university against Levine's The Opening of the American Mind and the lesson becomes clear: Veysey's institutional history is a classic. But Levine's is a worthy compliment in that it shows how curricular developments weren't just driven by internal bureaucracies or by disciplinary beliefs but were also influenced by the fact that the university began to cater to a much more diverse public. So in the same way Levine enriched the study of the university by looking at it through the lens of race, class and sex, we can potentially do the same thing when we write histories about the development of code. That doesn't mean that we can always give an affirmative answer to a question like "Is ____ racist?" But the question is worth posing nonetheless.

Third, I'm left with a question. Is it really true that an essay like McPherson's is impractical to teach to engineers as Haigh and Ceruzzi seem to feel? I would think that like say Winner's essay "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" it poses an important set of questions that are worth raising if we want to understand the relationship between politics and code. To that end I'd be interested in knowing how Kirschenbaum (and others) teach this essay in the classroom. What questions do they pose to the class? And how have engineering majors responded to it?

Sincerely,

Luke Fernandez

lfernandez.org

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Thanks Bernard,

Looks like the discussion is moving in a productive discussion.

Matt, I didn't mean to lead a charge of virtuous historians against the infidels of English. Why, some of my best friends are English professors. The argument I was making was basically one about the social construction of scholarly knowledge, which is something you'll find STS scholars and historians of science and technology are often quite familiar with. I was struck that some on the list found the paper in question unequivocally terrible, whereas others thought it to be good enough to assign in class and thus make it something students might pattern their own narratives after.

I do believe that these judgments reflect the aesthetic preferences of different disciplinary communities. From a broadly Latourian perspective, we are all in the business of producing texts in which claims and evidence are strung together. We learn how to do this as grad students and junior faculty, and only those who can do it very well become tenured professors. These aesthetic preferences for one or another kind of narrative become thoroughly internalized. Papers that don't follow the rules won't get published and people who don't follow the rules won't get hired.

But the rules for are different in different disciplines and sub-disciplines. That's a feature, not a bug as otherwise we wouldn't need more that one discipline. In this case the games are like American Football and Rugby. There are some familial resemblances, but moves that would win points in one context would be called as fouls in another. Of course there are a range of permitted styles within communities, and Matt himself writes with admirable cogency and clarity even from my own viewpoint.

Abundant evidence suggests that McPherson is doing a fine job when her text is evaluated by members of her own disciplinary communities. She works at a much better university than me, her chapter made it into the DH volume, it has been assigned for courses, etc. So, in all probability, was the professor who gave the talk at Penn long ago. According to the standards of other communities their arguments had gone off the rails. To use Kuhn's term, the standards for truth and excellence are incommensurable. A paper that could be published in Social Text would not be publishable in Technology and Culture, or vice versa. It's not a case of caring or not caring about getting things right or being truthful, but the most fundamental idea of STS is that standards for truth and proof are socially constructed and differ between communities and traditions. If we believe that's true of Unix and the technical communities we study then we need to eat our own dog food and admit that it's true in our own disciplines and of own work.

This is something I have become very aware of with my personal shifts of disciplinary context from computer science to history/STS to information studies. While my personal preferences are fairly clear, spending my life in a school where few of my colleagues share my assumptions about what a paper should look like, what counts as evidence, etc. has made me much more aware of the parochial nature of my own preferred traditions. McPherson would doubtless see the kind of history I enjoy reading and try to write as plodding, woefully under theorized, blind to its own class and gender privilege, etc. and by her own standards she'd be quite right. One of the nice things about SIGCIS is that we bring a diversity of scholarly traditions together, in fact a broader range than our parent society SHOT.

Best wishes,

Tom

On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:20 PM, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan < bernard.geoghegan@hu-berlin.de> wrote:

Hi All,

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled to add something too. Tom wrote:

. . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies.

...

There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid.

I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic iteration.

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, it seems to me. It is probably helpful that some folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate from other fields.

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).

Best, Bernard

...

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean.

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record.

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show.

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.

Best, Matt

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

-- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

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Tom what Churchman pointed out was that different disciplines used different philosophies to determine what was evidence for a truth. This is why many attempts and interdisciplinary work flounders. An old classic example was the classic "club of Rome model" where the system dynamics professional and the economists could not communicate because they saw truth in different ways of Libenizean verses Lockean. Early computing was very much a Leibnizian approach to truth using "equations" as truth with out any concern for the data. I think the transition to the future was the introduction of object oriented programming which was more Kantian in nature. Unix was the start of a transition. Another old story (about Unix The military took a version of Unix and made it a secure system that could handle classified data. They invited one of the two primary inventors of Unix to come in an test their system. It took him like sixty seconds because many years back he had built a back door to the system and never told anyone. It was still there in the secure military system. It was also in all the commercial system being used at that time. Back doors were common practice by the builders of software in the early days so they could get in quickly to fix anything that was going wrong. This was before bugs became features. On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Bernard,

Looks like the discussion is moving in a productive discussion.

Matt, I didn't mean to lead a charge of virtuous historians against the infidels of English. Why, some of my best friends are English professors. The argument I was making was basically one about the social construction of scholarly knowledge, which is something you'll find STS scholars and historians of science and technology are often quite familiar with. I was struck that some on the list found the paper in question unequivocally terrible, whereas others thought it to be good enough to assign in class and thus make it something students might pattern their own narratives after.

I do believe that these judgments reflect the aesthetic preferences of different disciplinary communities. From a broadly Latourian perspective, we are all in the business of producing texts in which claims and evidence are strung together. We learn how to do this as grad students and junior faculty, and only those who can do it very well become tenured professors. These aesthetic preferences for one or another kind of narrative become thoroughly internalized. Papers that don't follow the rules won't get published and people who don't follow the rules won't get hired.

But the rules for are different in different disciplines and sub-disciplines. That's a feature, not a bug as otherwise we wouldn't need more that one discipline. In this case the games are like American Football and Rugby. There are some familial resemblances, but moves that would win points in one context would be called as fouls in another. Of course there are a range of permitted styles within communities, and Matt himself writes with admirable cogency and clarity even from my own viewpoint.

Abundant evidence suggests that McPherson is doing a fine job when her text is evaluated by members of her own disciplinary communities. She works at a much better university than me, her chapter made it into the DH volume, it has been assigned for courses, etc. So, in all probability, was the professor who gave the talk at Penn long ago. According to the standards of other communities their arguments had gone off the rails. To use Kuhn's term, the standards for truth and excellence are incommensurable. A paper that could be published in Social Text would not be publishable in Technology and Culture, or vice versa. It's not a case of caring or not caring about getting things right or being truthful, but the most fundamental idea of STS is that standards for truth and proof are socially constructed and differ between communities and traditions. If we believe that's true of Unix and the technical communities we study then we need to eat our own dog food and admit that it's true in our own disciplines and of own work.

This is something I have become very aware of with my personal shifts of disciplinary context from computer science to history/STS to information studies. While my personal preferences are fairly clear, spending my life in a school where few of my colleagues share my assumptions about what a paper should look like, what counts as evidence, etc. has made me much more aware of the parochial nature of my own preferred traditions. McPherson would doubtless see the kind of history I enjoy reading and try to write as plodding, woefully under theorized, blind to its own class and gender privilege, etc. and by her own standards she'd be quite right. One of the nice things about SIGCIS is that we bring a diversity of scholarly traditions together, in fact a broader range than our parent society SHOT.

Best wishes,

Tom

On Aug 20, 2015, at 4:20 PM, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan < bernard.geoghegan@hu-berlin.de> wrote:

Hi All,

After Matthew threw in his two bits tom Tom's comments, I feel compelled to add something too. Tom wrote:

. . . I’m trained in history, rather than English or media studies.

...

There’s a difference between the kind of arguments that are allowed in the two fields, specifically with respect to evidence and claims about causation. Scholarship in English tends to be more self-consciously performative, and more concerned with joining up apparently unconnected things in a provocative or original way. I’m reminded of a workshop at Penn where Rob Kohler asked a visiting English professor “How would you know if an argument of this kind had gone off the rails and fallen off the cliff?” His suggestion was that you couldn’t, that the aesthetic standards at work meant that almost any connection of conclusion to evidence would be equally valid.

I'd put it a little differently, by saying that a stricter code of what can be considered causality governs much (though not all) academic historiography. The world is full of interrelations that are quite important but slip through the grid of standard academic historiography, which often favors certain kinds of narrative causality, and in anglophone contexts especially, certain kinds of intentionality or human agency, and so on. So I'd agree with Tom that it's about different notions of evidence and causation. However, because academic historiographic it's so bound up with matching a certain set of professional codes, it's not actually about "history" in the very first instance, but rather about shared standards that we can work around to "write history." In this regard, I think that sometimes adjacent fields -- sociology, media studies, literary studies, philosophy, even literature -- can in certain instances get closer to the messy interrelations that "make history" or "are history," even though they are not the stuff of "historiography" in its disciplinary, academic iteration.

To take an example relevant to the UNIX case: I did an oral history with an engineer who worked at Bell Labs from the 1950s through the 1970s, and he told me that working there was great, it was like a sleepover camp, they frequently worked all night and over the weekends. Then, he claimed, it all changed in the 1970s when they started "hiring womens and foreigners." In his account, the social life (I think Tom called it a "bromance" broke down. Not too long after, UNIX started becoming a big deal in the Labs. What does this mean? How do we map these interrelatedness of gender, race, and communication engineering that is suggested here? It's damn hard. Folks on this list such as Light, Medina, and Ensmenger have helped us start mapping out those relations historiographically. And yet, so much there will forever escape rigorous historiographic method. Does that mean those relations cannot be considered? Or that they cannot be considered empirically? Not at all, it seems to me. It is probably helpful that some folks from English or media studies can investigate these interrelations without worrying about the models of causality that govern mainstream disciplinary approaches to History. That's why so many of the major historiographic innovations don't originate in academic history, but instead migrate from other fields.

In that regard, and like J. Abbate, I think the McPherson piece is a wonderful provocation, an occasion to think further, and think historiographically, about problems are difficult to think about with established historiographic methods. (That's also why I like this list so much --- its grab-bag methodological character!).

Best, Bernard

...

I don't this is an especially helpful anecdote, other than perhaps a very low-resolution snapshot of the general embrace of indeterminacy that characterizes much of the academic humanities. By contrast, and given that my scholarly training is in English literature and that my professional activities take the form of "media studies" (including what we term book history, itself a form of media studies in my view), I feel very comfortable in asserting the following:

English professors (and media studies scholars) are interested in being right in so far as what reasonable people would understand getting their facts straight to mean.

English professors and media studies scholars are interested in primary sources and the archival record.

English professors and media studies scholars do not think anything goes, that one point of view is just as good as any other, or that it's all just, like, your opinion anyway, man.

I do think, as Tom, notes, that we are generally *more* interested in close reading and the ambiguities and sensitivities of language as evidence of historical phenomena, and more willing to place pressure on seeming contradictions or ambiguities which manifest at a linguistic level as evidence of same; and that we are generally more sympathetic to social constructivist (as opposed to techno determinist) arguments. These are huge sweeping statements of course, and my own intent is less to throw down the gauntlet with any single one of them than to offer a general corrective to the notion that the difference between media or cultural or literary studies on the one hand, and the work of an historian on the other is that the one is concerned with getting it right and the others just want to put on a good show.

I don't think Tom really thinks that either, btw, but I have been a little concerned to see it taken up as an acceptable explanation for whatever shortcomings people perceive to be at work in the essay that kicked off the discussion. Disciplinary differences are very real to be sure, but they can't be reduced to anecdote and caricature.

Best, Matt

-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Associate Professor of English Associate Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) University of Maryland http://mkirschenbaum.net or @mkirschenbaum on Twitter

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-- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com

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On 8/18/15 7:59 AM, Al Kossow wrote:

On 8/18/15 6:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul wrote:

...

Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11.

peek and poke were microcomputer additions

The string editing things were additions from Tymshare for Super BASIC on the SDS 940. I was told Super BASIC's extensions on the Harvard TSS 940 system was the influence for those functions in Micro-Soft BASIC.

RSTS BASIC on the PDP-11 had many of the same extensions which carried forward into DEC's other implementations of the language.

I found a collection of BASIC users manuals for many different systems in the CHM archives a while back, so bitsavers.org has a collection of many of them filed by manufacturer. I had been researching where the language changes originated from for a paper, which I never finished.

Matt hits on the key passage of what I understand as the article's point: Unix is not a direct cause of racism nor is Unix inherently racist, instead, certain programming practices reflect broader cultural ideas about modularity and standardization. These ideas also manifest in ideas about race during the Civil Rights movement and beyond. Again, I think David Golumbia's *The Cultural Logic of Computation* expresses this more fully to highlight that computation is not simply about the technology itself but has broad implications for how we conceive of and think about the world around us. McPherson shows that the sort of thinking that manifests itself in "color-blind" policies and civil rights backlash have parallels with the sort of rhetoric expressed in Unix programming manuals. I think the response to this article has a lot do with broader ideas about what constitutes the "history of computing." Articles like this one are common or at least not out of place in critical code studies, platform studies, American studies departments, English departments, and cultural studies departments. As Thomas Haigh notes in his excellent overview of the field "The History of Information Technology," there is little of the cultural or linguistic turn in history that has been taken by historians of computing. Paul's recommendation, I think, represents a good example of how different disciplines conceive of what is important. The book he mentioned, which I admit I have only briefly looked at, is about African American individuals at NASA but it does not go in depth on the ways that racial assumptions manifest themselves in technological production or use. That, I think is the more important point of this article rather than if there is a direct causality between racism and Unix. Sincerely, Nabeel On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 12:11 PM, Christopher Leslie <chris.leslie@nyu.edu> wrote:

Thanks for initiating this interesting discussion, Janet. We had considered making Diversity the theme of this year's SIGCIS workshop, and maybe we dropped the idea too soon.

I agree that McPherson's article is not fully developed, but then again, it's not a journal article. She conspicuously labels sections fragments and is writing to explore. It's heartening to hear that several people are using this as a conversation starter in their classrooms.

McPherson cites Winner and other scholars who border on a deterministic analysis, and her writing walks that line too. However, we could also fault her article for going the other way. Cultural determinism is as much a fallacy as technological determinism, and we could fault her question that way as well: just because Unix was developed in an era when racism was keenly felt, does Unix have to somehow bear the mark of that culture?

However, the keenly expressed antagonism to this question seems disproportionate. As a profession, we're willing to say that personal computing carries traces of cold war culture (thanks to Edwards and others), or that the economic and political system of the USSR made it unlikely that a distributed communication system would develop (thanks to Gerovitch). It's clear that we don't have the full picture of how the interaction between the predominantly white, male culture at the time of Unix's development would result in particular design decisions. At the very least, though, we could assert that the particular kind of time-sharing we got worked well with a community that was lacking in diversity.

Asking these kinds of questions is important because we are still dealing with a community that is finding it difficult to diversify. The medical profession, which also was largely white and male in the 1960s, made it a professional imperative to diversify with the result that medical school admissions are much different than they were 50 years ago. Engineering and computer science have not been successful in that regard, despite noble attempts in various corners. SIGCIS and other groups could make an effort to explore the reasons for this failure.

Chris Leslie

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 11:02 AM, Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org> wrote:

...

On 8/18/15 7:59 AM, Al Kossow wrote:

...

On 8/18/15 6:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul wrote:

...

Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11.

peek and poke were microcomputer additions

The string editing things were additions from Tymshare for Super BASIC on the SDS 940. I was told Super BASIC's extensions on the Harvard TSS 940 system was the influence for those functions in Micro-Soft BASIC.

RSTS BASIC on the PDP-11 had many of the same extensions which carried forward into DEC's other implementations of the language.

I found a collection of BASIC users manuals for many different systems in the CHM archives a while back, so bitsavers.org has a collection of many of them filed by manufacturer. I had been researching where the language changes originated from for a paper, which I never finished.

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-- Christopher S. Leslie, Ph.D. Co-Director of Science and Technology Studies Program Faculty Fellow in Residence for Othmer Hall and Clark Street Vice Chair, IFIP History of Computing Working Group 9.7

NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering 5 MetroTech Center, LC 131 Brooklyn, NY 11201 (646) 997-3130

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I have yet to read the UNIX piece cited here but our ambivalences toward it seem to resonate a bit with ambivalences that have been leveled against Langdon Winner's claim that Robert Moses' Long Island express way overpasses had racist consequences. Winner's claim has been contested and yet, as a seminal article in the field, I presume that many of us assign it because it raises interesting questions about the relationship between politics and technology. It sounds like the UNIX essay raises similar questions. Is that an adequate rationale for assigning it? Or am I eliding important differences between the two essays? Luke lfernandez.org On Aug 18, 2015 10:38 AM, "Chris Peterson" <chris@cpeterson.org> wrote:

On Aug 18, 2015, at 12:11 PM, Christopher Leslie <chris.leslie@nyu.edu> wrote:

Cultural determinism is as much a fallacy as technological determinism, and we could fault her question that way as well: just because Unix was developed in an era when racism was keenly felt, does Unix have to somehow bear the mark of that culture?

+1. I feel like I see this move being made more frequently…but it’s a better way to open a vein of exploration than to make a claim.

One interesting analogue (the real reason for this email) is Roy Wagner’s 2009 paper <http://www2.mta.ac.il/~rwagner/publications/mathematical%20marriages%20sss.pdf> on the stable marriage problem as a gendered concept in mathematics/economics/computer science education, which I encountered after some undergraduates came to me to complain/critique its usage in the undergraduate CS curriculum here at MIT.

Asking these kinds of questions is important because we are still dealing with a community that is finding it difficult to diversify. The medical profession, which also was largely white and male in the 1960s, made it a professional imperative to diversify with the result that medical school admissions are much different than they were 50 years ago. Engineering and computer science have not been successful in that regard, despite noble attempts in various corners. SIGCIS and other groups could make an effort to explore the reasons for this failure.

The International Olympiad of Informatics, which is the top high school programming competition in the world, issued a paper <http://ioinformatics.org/oi/pdf/v9_2015_127_137.pdf> this year looking over the last few (dismal) decades of (lack) of women in that particular program, what they’ve tried in the past, and what they might try in the future.

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This is not a direct comment on McPherson's article, other than a bit at the end. More generally, I just wanted to underscore the importance of modularity as a concept for computing and related fields. It makes sense to explore its various technological and cultural contexts fully, and especially important to recognize their plurality. One thread - my recollection is that Tara does not mention it - is modularity as a term that arose out of the mix of management and computing research c. 1960. One name probably suffices to identify this area: Herbert Simon. This area also touches, as in Simon's own work, with biological research. It emphasizes modularity as an approach to dealing with complexity, rather than division/segregation. Another thread worth mentioning is the literature on modularity as a core concept in historical technology studies. I am thinking of Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology) and others. His discussion reveals ways in which a kind of modular thinking is deeply engrained in various engineering disciplines, such as aircraft design, for example. Another context within which I am working is the history of computer game technology, specifically game engines, where concepts like modularity are critical, along with similar concepts such as "abstraction layers." My point is really very simple: Modularity is a big, important topic. There is plenty of room under that tent for a whole range of interpretive dives. BTW this discussion reminds me (thus showing my age) of the reactions to Paul Forman's controversial "Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory: adaptation by German physicists and mathematicians to a hostile environment," which first appeared in 1971. Not saying McPherson's argument is as deeply thought-through and documented, but the elevator-pitch version of the two papers would be quite similar, though for different disciplines and contexts. I hope that I did not duplicate points made by others - if so, apologies. Henry Henry Lowood, PhD Curator for History of Science & Technology; Film & Media Collections HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall Stanford University Libraries Stanford, California 94305-6066 Email: lowood@stanford.edu Web: https://people.stanford.edu/lowood/ -----Original Message----- From: Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of mariann unterluggauer Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 10:39 AM To: members@lists.sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist? hi, i admit, i haven't read the paper, but i have read this thread. as the word "race" appears several times, i feel the need to make it clear that there is no "race". "race" doesn't exist. not in the sense you are using it, and i doubt you want to tell me something about "the act of running" or "contest of speed". all the best, mariann

A few little known insights on Basic early on: A manager of a development group at GE got permission from Dartmouth to put basic on the GE 225. His management at GE saw no value to doing that and told him he could not waste his time on that since programming was only for professional programmers. This chap (once a long time ago i knew his name) went ahead and had his group do this and he was given a 90 day termination notice. On about the 88 day he had a working version and had it send to all ge 225 users and walked out of the company on the 90 th day. Three months later a large majority of the current GE 225 owners told GE if they did not support the GE basic they could take back their GE machines. The chap was hired back at a sizable increase in salary on length of contract. When the international GE timesharing BASIC system was launched a group of us, located in different countries, who were working on the same area of research on message and conferencing communications shared a single account and use the title of a basic program to indicate who was sending a message to whom or to the group and then REM lines to write the message. It was far cheaper than any use of phone or teletype. it was perhaps the first international message system open to the public. Too many of these early events are unrecorded. On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Ceruzzi, Paul <CeruzziP@si.edu> wrote:

Well, we know that BASIC was developed at Dartmouth College, which at the time was all-male and quite the macho place. Dartmouth was founded to train Native Americans for the Christian ministry—enough about that. It was also the inspiration for the movie _*Animal House*_. What this has to do with BASIC I have no idea, but when I think of Dartmouth BASIC, I think of John Belushi in the cafeteria (a scene that was totally ad-libbed by the way). What for me in most interesting about Dartmouth BASIC is that it was designed for a time-shared system, but it was adapted by the PC community for the Altair and other PCs. That was a radical re-definition of the language. For example, you could not have commands like “Peek” and “Poke” in Dartmouth BASIC, if you’re running it on a time-shared mainframe. You’d crash the system. But Peek & Poke were absolutely necessary for the personal computer, given the limitations of memory they had. (Also “usr.”) Kemeney & Kurtz did not approve of the way BASIC was modified, but it had to happen. Who came up with those changes?—it may have been at DEC for the PDP-11.

Are the terms “peek” and “poke” sexist? Probably, but we do know that among the computer companies of the 1960s, DEC was one of the most progressive in hiring women.

As for the Is UNIX Racist discussion, I am disappointed that some of you use that paper in coursework. But there are so few alternatives, and the topic is sorely in need of further study. I talked about this at the SIG meeting in Dearborn. We need to address the topic in a more fundamental way. I recommend a recent book by a colleague of mine, Richard Paul, _*We Could Not Fail*_, about African-Americans who worked for NASA in southern NASA Centers, during the hey-day of the Space Race. Around the same time, IBM established a major facility in Atlanta, and the company had to remind the Atlanta political and real-estate establishment that its employees were to be treated fairly. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, Hank Aaron expressed some concern about the move. The issue was real. What about the effort by Ken Olsen at DEC and William Norriss at CDC to establish plants in inner city neighborhoods, in St. Paul, Boston, and Springfield, Mass.? What became of those plants?

As I said, this topic merits serious discussion, but the UNIX paper? Maybe not so much.

Paul Ceruzzi

*From:* Members [mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] *On Behalf Of *Andrew Meade McGee *Sent:* Monday, August 17, 2015 8:19 PM *To:* Nabeel Siddiqui *Cc:* Sigcis *Subject:* Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

On a semi-related query, has there been much race-, gender-, or class-related discussion around the cultural logic or social context of the development or reception of BASIC?

I could imagine that fitting into a larger conversation on class, institutions, social action, and (possibly) accusations of paternalism given its Sixties-era development and Dartmouth origins. Just curious -- I admittedly know far less than I should about the dissemination of programming languages.

Best,

Andrew

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Andrew Meade McGee Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia PO Box 400180 - Nau Hall Charlottesville, VA 22904

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Nabeel Siddiqui <nasiddiqui@email.wm.edu> wrote:

I assign it in my course to discuss race with students, but it does have its problems, specifically correlation vs causality. While the article doesn't get into it, I think it adds to David Golumbia's *Cultural Logic of Computation* on how computation provides a set of ideas and metaphors for people to think about the world around them. The Digital Humanities part is actually a part that was tacked on and doesn't really add much to the article.

Originally, the article was release as "U.S. Operating System at Mid-Century" in *Race After the Internet*, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. Link to the original article's pdf here: http://history.msu.edu/hst830/files/2014/01/McPherson_2012.pdf

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Janet Abbate <abbate@vt.edu> wrote:

Anyone seen this piece by Tara Mcpherson? It starts with some interesting questions, but I found the follow-through to be disappointingly ahistorical. Again and again she argues that there must be a connection between the modularity of Unix and the compartmentalization of race within American culture, but then immediately admits that she has no evidence for any direct connection. As far as I can tell, the only reason she singles out Unix is because it coincides conveniently with the US Civil Rights era. I'm curious to know what others think.

"Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation." http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29

Janet

Dr. Janet Abbate Associate Professor, Science & Technology in Society Co-director, National Capital Region STS program Virginia Tech www.sts.vt.edu/ncr www.linkedin.com/groups/STS-Virginia-Tech-4565055 www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS

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-- *please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com <murray.turoff@gmail.com> do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff <http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*

Dear Chuck, your message made me think of another item some of you might enjoy. I was a phd student at Brandeis doing a huge model of a planetary nebula which took three hours on the "big" ibm machine at MIT (1964) I could only get access once a week at midnight on friday or saturday night. But also becoming the graduate student at Brandeis doing programs for the physics professors at Brandeis, i was at mit quite a bit for seminars and such. One amusing story that set a future tradition in softwareD development was when the big IBM batch multiprogramming operational system was when it developed a bug where if someone left off the special end card that had to be added to your fortran deck, it would wipe the memory of the system and cause a need for a restart. It was report as a standard bug to IBM but a month later it happened again and someone at mit phone ibm and complained about the bug again and asked why didn't they fix it. The chap at ibm said to go look at a recent page in the current volume of fixes of which there were many. They did and found: "As an added advantage if you wish to clear memory in the computer leave off the end card from Fortran program." This became common practice in a lot of complicated software systems where bugs were redefined as features! On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Chuck House <housec1839@gmail.com> wrote:

Re your last 'throw-away' line, Murray, my sentiments exactly.

Jennifer Light gave a terrific talk at last fall's SIGCIS meeting, describing 'our world' as about 400 professional computer historians, arrayed in five non-intersecting (somewhat disdainful) circles whilst all about us the practitioners are dying and taking their wonderful unrecorded stories with them.

When you're in the fray, say writing GE 225 BASIC, and being fired, you're not focused on recording the story. And you likely don't view it as having any historical significance. The problem later on is "If not you, who? And if not now, when?"

Practitioners, at the least, have to become more aware, more motivated, and more involved in 'our collective history' even if it is only their small spot in the sun. Not easy to imagine

Best, Chuck

From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Murray Turoff <murray.turoff@gmail.com> Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 6:30 PM To: "Ceruzzi, Paul" <CeruzziP@si.edu> Cc: "members@sigcis.org" <members@sigcis.org> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Is Unix racist?

Too many of these early events are unrecorded.

-- *please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com <murray.turoff@gmail.com> do not use @njit.edu <http://njit.edu> addressDistinguished Professor EmeritusInformation Systems, NJIThomepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff <http://is.njit.edu/turoff>*

Dear list members, There were one or two comments over at the Humanist list ( http://dhhumanist.org/) on this thread here. I commented over there that it was not the first time I had witnessed pretty aggressive knee-jerk reactions specifically on McPherson's piece in a specifically tech/engineering context. And I hinted at the possibility that such reactions might be the result of a relative poorly developed self-reflexivity in the IT-domain with regard to some still strongly held norms and believes, e.g. the neutrality of code and engineering. As a result I was pointed to an article by Fiona Barnett: Barnett, Fiona M., 2014. "The Brave Side of DH". *Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies*, 25(1). doi 10.1215/10407391-2420003. Quite justified, in view of my own experiences in any case, she delves into very similar knee jerk reactions within the field of digital humanities itself. I report that here as it may offer an interesting follow up read to McPherson's article. Two more cents I guess… Similar to Matthew Kirschenbaum I think that McPherson and Barnett simply point out that existing social structures converge to determine what will be recognized as belonging to or contributing to their (sub)cultures. Such social constructs influence technological development, the formation of professional fields, and communities of practice. This in turn then begs the question if and how strong the developed technology re-inscribes these social structures into society. To make it very simple: if you design a visual only interface you are re-enforcing the disabilities of the blind. McPherson I think mostly pleas for investigating how such constructs work by exemplifying one way of trying to attack and deconstruct them. Discarding such attempts at investigating socio-technological interaction, even if they maybe are still methodologically somewhat underdeveloped, strikes me as being dangerously careless about the impact of technology. Kind regards --Joris PS Barnett's article is behind a paywall, but #icanhazpdf worked wonders, and so does email obviously. On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 10:42 PM Sharon Traweek <traweek@history.ucla.edu> wrote:

Hi Thanks to everyone for the fascinating discussion!

re BASIC, UNIX, bugs becoming features, modularities, abstraction levels, algorithms, ontologies, taxonomies, et al ... I am seeking more references to specific cases about how those in marginal positions [rank, job classification, domain, age, class, sexuality, ethnicity, 'race,' gender, disability, nationality] might have been engaged in significant innovations, perhaps as yet unacknowledged/unreported with respect to computing work? That is, has the experience of being 'in the margins' enabled some people to see, if not outside the box, at least most of the box from their distinctive position at the edge? Cheers, Sharon Sharon Traweek, UCLA _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at 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://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org