Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society

by Janet Abbate (Editor), Stephanie Dick (Editor)

Overview

Cutting-edge historians explore ideas, communities, and technologies around modern computing to explore how computers mediate social relations.

Computers have been framed both as a mirror for the human mind and as an irreducible other that humanness is defined against, depending on different historical definitions of "humanness." They can serve both liberation and control because some people's freedom has historically been predicated on controlling others. Historians of computing return again and again to these contradictions, as they often reveal deeper structures.

Using twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment, a reformulation of the old mind-body dichotomy, this anthology examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing. The authors examining "Abstraction" revisit central concepts in computing, including "algorithm," "program," "clone," and "risk." In doing so, they demonstrate how the meanings of these terms reflect power relations and social identities. The section on "Embodiments" focuses on sensory aspects of using computers as well as the ways in which gender, race, and other identities have shaped the opportunities and embodied experiences of computer workers and users. Offering a rich and diverse set of studies in new areas, the book explores such disparate themes as disability, the influence of the punk movement, working mothers as technical innovators, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain.

Abstractions and Embodiments reimagines computing history by questioning canonical interpretations, foregrounding new actors and contexts, and highlighting neglected aspects of computing as an embodied experience. It makes the profound case that both technology and the body are culturally shaped and that there can be no clear distinction between social, intellectual, and technical aspects of computing.

Contributors: Janet Abbate, Marc Aidinoff, Troy Kaighin Astarte, Ekaterina Babinsteva, André Brock, Maarten Bullynck, Jiahui Chan, Gerardo Con Diaz, Liesbeth De Mol, Stephanie Dick, Kelcey Gibbons, Elyse Graham, Michael J. Halvorson, Mar Hicks, Scott Kushner, Xiaochang Li, Zachary Loeb, Lisa Nakamura, Tiffany Nichols, Laine Nooney, Elizabeth Petrick, Cierra Robson, Hallam Stevens, Jaroslav Švelch

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421444376
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	08/30/2022
Series:	Studies in Computing and Culture
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.21(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Janet Abbate (FALLS CHURCH, VA) is a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Inventing the Internet and Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing.

Stephanie Dick (VANCOUVER, BC) is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction. Thinking with Computers Janet Abbate Stephanie Dick 1

Part I Abstractions

1 Waiting for Midnight: Risk Perception and the Millennium Bug Zachary Loeb 23

2 Centrists against the Center: The Jeffersonian Politics of a Decentralized Internet Marc Aidinoff 40

3 Beyond the Pale: The Blackbird Web Browser's Critical Reception André Brock 60

4 Scientology Online: Copyright Infringement and the Legal Construction of the Internet Gerardo Con Diaz 84

5 Patenting Automation of Race and Ethnicity Classifications: Protecting Neutral Technology or Disparate Treatment by Proxy? Tiffany Nichols 102

6 "Difficult Things Are Difficult to Describe": The Role of Formal Semantics in European Computer Science, 1960-1980 Troy Kaighin Astarte 126

7 What's in a Name? Origins, Transpositions, and Transformations of the Triptych Algorithm-Code-Program Liesbeth de Mol Maarten Bullynck 146

8 The Lurking Problem Scott Kushner 169

9 The Help Desk: Changing Images of Product Support in Personal Computing, 1975-1990 Michael J. Halvorson 189

10 Power to the Clones: Hardware and Software Bricolage on the Periphery Jaroslav Svelch 208

Part II Embodiments

11 Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture Lisa Nakamura 231

12 Inventing the Black Computer Professional Kelcey Gibbons 257

13 The Baby and the Black Box: A History of Software, Sexism, and the Sound Barrier Mar Hicks 277

14 Computing Nanyang: Information Technology in a Developing Singapore, 1965-1985 Jiahui Chan Hallam Stevens 299

15 Engineering the Lay Mind: Lev Landa's Algo-Heuristic Theory and Artificial Intelligence Ekaterina Babintseva 319

16 The Measure of Meaning: Automatic Speech Recognition and the Human-Computer Imagination Xiaochang Li 341

17 Broken Mirrors: Surveillance in Oakland as Both Reflection and Refraction of California's Carceral State Cierra Robson 360

18 Punk Culture and the Rise of the Hacker Ethic Elyse Graham 380

19 The Computer as Prosthesis? Embodiment, Augmentation, and Disability Elizabeth Petrick 399

20 "Have Any Remedies for Tired Eyes?": Computer Pain as Computer History Laine Nooney 416

Afterword. Beyond Abstractions and Embodiments Stephanie Dick Janet Abbate 435

Contributors 443

Index 447

What People are Saying About This

Fred Turner

Every so often, an edited collection announces a paradigm shift. This is one of those books. As it shows, the history of computing has become much more than the study of digital devices. It has become the study of a deep and ongoing transformation in the architecture of our social lives.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

This insightful collection offers new ways to understand computing by challenging the core oppositions that dominate our stories about them: abstractions vs. embodiments, machines vs. humans, software vs. hardware. Bringing together essays by established scholars and young researchers who are changing the field of the history of computing, this collection shows how each side shapes and reshapes the other.

Peter Galison

Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick offer us a dazzling curated take on computation. These essays pull the putatively universal, abstracted machine, one floating above the human, down to the earthy of specific, materialized objects entangled with our embodied, gendered, racialized, working bodies. The authors of this volume make computers a thousand times more interesting by showing them to be part of our everyday; it is a social history of computing tied to the real-world fabric of our lives. Our one and zero machines won't look the same to anyone who plunges with this book into computers as they are in our politicking, speculating, theorizing, weaponizing, coercing, extracting, surveilling, hacking, and medicalizing world.

From the Publisher

I strongly recommend this excellent, engaging book. The abstractions and embodiments framing, the range of captivating and important themes, the geographical coverage and diversity, and the deep insights of the editors and chapter authors all make this richly thoughtful and highly compelling scholarship. It will be a very influential book for many years to come.
—Jeffrey R. Yost, University of Minnesota, coauthor of FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World

Every so often, an edited collection announces a paradigm shift. This is one of those books. As it shows, the history of computing has become much more than the study of digital devices. It has become the study of a deep and ongoing transformation in the architecture of our social lives.
—Fred Turner, Stanford University, coauthor of Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America

Eden Medina

I keep returning to one of the book's central questions: in computer history, who has a mind and who has a body? By bringing together themes of abstraction and embodiment, this evocative book helps us see computer history, and its study, in exciting new ways.

Ruha Benjamin

Drawing together an extraordinary group of scholars, this volume contains individual chapters that challenge us to rethink what we thought we knew about specific currents in the history of computing and society. As a whole, the text inspires a vital reimagining of the relationship between abstraction and embodiment, which is sure to make it required reading for years to come.

Jeffrey R. Yost

I strongly recommend this excellent, engaging book. The abstractions and embodiments framing, the range of captivating and important themes, the geographical coverage and diversity, and the deep insights of the editors and chapter authors all make this richly thoughtful and highly compelling scholarship. It will be a very influential book for many years to come.

Editorial Reviews

Abstractions and Embodiments may offer histories of computing, but it is not solely of interest to historians and computer scientists. There is plenty within this book to be of interest to scholars across the fields of information science and technology....Abstractions and Embodiments is a welcome volume and a conversation starter. The diverse set of articles presented here serves to deepen and complicate the histories that we have heard before.
—Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

From the Publisher