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Reviews
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
472
ISBN
9781421444376
Illustration Description
22 b&w photos, 8 b&w illus.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Thinking with Computers
Part I. Abstractions
Chapter 1. Waiting for Midnight: Risk Perception and the Millennium Bug
Chapter 2. Centrists against the Center: The Jeffersonian
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Thinking with Computers
Part I. Abstractions
Chapter 1. Waiting for Midnight: Risk Perception and the Millennium Bug
Chapter 2. Centrists against the Center: The Jeffersonian Politics of a Decentralized Internet
Chapter 3. Beyond the Pale: The Blackbird Web Browser's Critical Reception
Chapter 4. Scientology Online: Copyright Infringement and the Legal Construction of the Internet
Chapter 5. Patenting Automation of Race and Ethnicity Classifications: Protecting Neutral Technology or Disparate Treatment by Proxy?
Chapter 6. "Difficult Things Are Difficult to Describe": The Role of Formal Semantics in European Computer Science, 1960–1980
Chapter 7. What's in a Name? Origins, Transpositions, and Transformations of the Triptych Algorithm–Code–Program
Chapter 8. The Lurking Problem
Chapter 9. The Help Desk: Changing Images of Product Support in Personal Computing, 1975–1990
Chapter 10. Power to the Clones: Hardware and Software Bricolage on the Periphery
Part II: Embodiments
Chapter 11. Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture
Chapter 12. Inventing the Black Computer Professional
Chapter 13. The Baby and the Black Box: A History of Software, Sexism, and the Sound Barrier
Chapter 14. Computing Nanyang: Information Technology in a Developing Singapore, 1965–1985
Chapter 15. Engineering the Lay Mind: Lev Landa's Algo-Heuristic Theory and Artificial Intelligence
Chapter 16. The Measure of Meaning: Automatic Speech Recognition and the Human-Computer Imagination
Chapter 17. Broken Mirrors: Surveillance in Oakland as Both Reflection and Refraction of California's Carceral State
Chapter 18. Punk Culture and the Rise of the Hacker Ethic
Chapter 19. The Computer as Prosthesis? Embodiment, Augmentation, and Disability
Chapter 20. "Have Any Remedies for Tired Eyes?": Computer Pain as Computer History
Afterword. Beyond Abstractions and Embodiments
Contributors
Index
Featured Contributor
Janet Abbate
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.
Featured Contributor
