Category: academic cultures

Remembering Professor Halcyon Lawrence

On the last day of Black History Month, and the eve of Women’s History Month, I wanted to take some time to tell you about Professor Halcyon Lawrence, who is a part of both of these histories. She was a brilliant, kind, pathbreaking, and warm colleague, and she died suddenly in late October 2023.

It has taken me a while to make these thoughts public because she was such a special person, and I wanted to do justice both to her and her work in writing about her. I know I have missed many things below, but one other reason I feel it’s important to post this is because, thanks to the boom in “generative” AI, hundreds of random sites started posting fake, Chat-GPT generated obituaries of her right after her death. These were full of misstatements and outright falsehoods, but unfortunately many sounded true enough that well-meaning people intending to memorialize her and spread word of her passing accidentally (and understandably) shared them. In this current moment, the hype around AI-generated informational poison knows no bounds, and unfortunately that means that nothing is off limits.

One of the things that was so important to Halcyon in life was making sure that humanity did not get lost in the course of deploying technology, and that people were centered in any conversation about how machines should work. So I am trying to honor that part of her message with this post that pushes back, in some small way, against the inhumane AI-generated text that is starting to take over the web. If you are a person who knew and admired her, please leave a comment to add your memories of, and experiences with, Dr. Lawrence. (There is a moderation delay as I manually approve comments.)

Dr. Halcyon Lawrence was a good friend and colleague whom I had known for over a decade. She was a graduate of the technical communication PhD program (now defunct) at Illinois Institute of Technology, and at the time of her death was an Associate Professor of technical communication and user design at Towson University in Maryland, having earned tenure early. (A Towson graduate has written a very moving remembrance of her here.)

She was an amazing scholar, and a unique and original thinker who studied how linguistic imperialism embedded itself into speech technologies, and how this issue could be averted and countered by both technical and nontechnical means. At the time of her death, she was one of only a few scholars working on this problem, which affects the majority of English speakers in the world.

She was also the kind of person who let everyone else know how much she valued and appreciated them every time she talked to them, and her good example rubbed off on others. As a result, I always tried to let her know how much I valued and appreciated her every time we talked. I was so thankful for how she had taught me to be more open in that way, particularly when I realized, in retrospect, that we had talked for the final time.

Dr. Halcyon Lawrence delivering a keynote at a conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California in 2017. Photo by Mar Hicks.

Prof. Lawrence was originally from Trinidad and Tobago, and this deeply influenced the work that she did: she focused on linguistics and technical communication, with an especial interest in studying how accent bias in automated technologies opened up new questions and areas of study. She often pointed out that even though the number of people in the world who speak English with a “nonstandard” accent–in other words, not British, American, or Australian–matches or outnumbers the people who do, speech recognition technologies barely take this into account.

As someone who herself often needed to code-switch to be understood by automated systems, she felt this inequitable part of technological “progress” acutely. One thing she always highlighted was that she could use clear speech strategies to communicate with people who didn’t immediately understand her accent (such as speaking more slowly, hyper-enunciating, etc.), but doing these things with machines was rarely as successful. People can meet each other halfway, while machines have often been programmed to refuse to do so. And this, she pointed out, was an intentional, political, technical choice on the part of the largely white and U.S.-based technologists who initially designed and deployed these technologies. If you’d like to read a chapter she wrote on this topic from a book I co-edited, you can read a preprint for free here: Siri Disciplines. Below, you can see a photo of her presenting this work at Stanford, at one of the conferences that led up to the publication of that book.

Dr. Halcyon Lawrence speaks at Stanford in 2017. Photo by Mar Hicks.

Halcyon had the ability to hold audiences rapt when she spoke about her work, both because of what she was saying and because of how she communicated. In the spring of 2023 she gave a talk to my graduate seminar that my students gushed about for weeks afterward. She made her lectures participatory and engaging, always meeting people where they were without giving up where she was coming from. I was so glad to have funding to invite her to come speak to my fall 2023 class as well (via videoconference), and she had been looking forward to it. But when we talked via email just a week before, she knew she was ill and needed time off to rest. She thought she had more time left than just a few short days, so I was deeply saddened and shocked when I heard about her passing. The historian in me recognizes that if there were less structural racism in the medical systems that we rely on in this country, she may well not have ended up in the sudden, dire position that she did.

The memory that seems to resonate for many people who knew Dr. Lawrence is how unusually kind and engaged she was. Halcyon was well known and loved in her field, and many other fields, for her kindness and generosity of spirit, her intellectual fearlessness, and her willingness to mentor, help, and support her fellow scholars. Her razor sharp insights and her dedication to building more inclusive communities and technologies, especially speech technologies, impacted multiple disciplines and powerfully influenced how people thought about the relationships between speech, empire, and technology. Colleagues in her field are in the midst of preparing a special section of Communication Design Quarterly to commemorate her work’s impact, and I greatly look forward to reading it. Even in her lifetime, her work was highlighted in the press for pointing out an important new dimension in the fight against biased and broken tech.

When Halcyon and I were both at Illinois Tech, it was always a treat when she was in her office and free to talk at the same time I had free time. A few minutes of conversation with her could truly light up your entire day. One afternoon, we walked out to the lakeshore in Hyde Park, where she told me about her upbringing in Trinidad and Tobago, surrounded by devices on the cutting edge of computing because of the work her father did. She was always comfortable with technology–just never comfortable with needlessly ceding power and agency to it. She wanted it to be firmly human-centered, and serve people’s needs better. While still a graduate student, for instance, she collaborated on a project to help the Chicago Transit Authority make the stop announcements on the ‘L’ and on buses more easily understood in high noise environments. If you have ridden public transit in Chicago, you have probably benefited from her work.

One of my first meetings with Halcyon is the memory that feels most fitting to end with: I will always remember how, when I interviewed for my job at Illinois Tech, she (as a grad student) was the only member of the department who stayed for the final meeting of the day, to talk to me some more as the sun set and the roads iced over on a cold Chicago winter night, instead of leaving early like all the faculty in the department had. I kept letting her know that she didn’t have to stay just to keep me company, but she truly wanted to stay and talk to me. She valued ideas, but valued the people they came from even more. Her intellectual practice was strengthened so much by her approach to people, and I will always remember the impact this had. Over the years, I have often found myself thinking of how she did things when I am trying to do better. It was an honor to have known her and learned from her.

Rest in peace, Professor. You made such a positive impact on so many.

SHOT Book Launch

At the Society for the History of Technology Meeting this coming weekend in Philadelphia, MIT Press will being doing a joint launch of my book and Edward Jones-Imhotep’s terrific new volume on a unique set of Cold War technological failures. It runs from 3:30-4:30 on Friday, October 27, at the MIT Press table in the SHOT book hall. Discounts, free bookmarks, and snacks will be available! Come on by.

Learning How to Read Better (In College & Beyond)

The short guide below evolved out of a conversation with Miriam Posner (@miriamkp) of UCLA who was looking for ways to help her students read more quickly and effectively. These tips can help you retain more when reading academic texts and allow you to get through them at a quicker pace.

Here’s what I tell my students if they have trouble keeping up with the reading for my history and STS classes: Continue reading

Press and Early Reviews for Programmed Inequality

photo courtesy of Cathy Gillespie (pictured)

I’m honored that the Times Higher Education Supplement, a leading publication for higher education professionals, has chosen Programmed Inequality for its prestigious book of the week slot this week. Professor John Gilbey writes in his review that Programmed Inequality is “a sophisticated work of scholarship: detailed, insightful, deeply researched,” and “has a much wider relevance, too, which it would be unwise to understate. Discussing, as it does, the role of profoundly structural gender discrimination in the collapse of technical dominance by a formerly great power, this book makes very uncomfortable reading – on a number of levels.” Read the full review and the interview that follows it here: The failure of the UK computer industry in the 20th century holds uncomfortable lessons for the US in the 21st century, writes the Times Higher Educational Supplement

I was also fortunate enough to be on the radio (twice!) last week discussing Programmed Inequality. The first was with Steve Grzanich of WGN Radio in Chicago on his show The Opening Bell (listen to the podcast here). The second was with Frank Stasio of WUNC Radio on his show The State of Things (listen to the podcast here). And after I went on air at WUNC I headed to the Regulator Bookshop in Durham, NC (home of Duke University, where I got my PhD) to give a book talk.

Photo by Ashley Willard

 

Getting your bearings if you were surprised

In the wake of an election that has chagrined many, I made up a list of 10 films for students in my “Disasters” course. My intent was to help them get a sense of why we are where we are today, in a way that wouldn’t require them to add to the mountains of reading and problem sets they already do for their courses.

The list is below–they’re mostly documentaries. But not the boring kind. I decided to leave it handwritten, rather than type it up, because I think we could all use traces of each other as human beings right now. Plus, that way you can see my “Depress-o-meter” rating for each film (in the margin). I did that so you won’t end up watching something terribly depressing when you’re already crushed, as my students seemed to be this Wednesday  when I saw them in class.

The #SIGCIS #DH panel at #SHOT2015

I was very glad to be a part of the digital history and humanities panel at the SIGCIS Workshop (part of the 2015 meeting of the Society of the History of Technology in Albuquerque this year), As background to my comments, I’ve provided my Digital Labor Class syllabus, which was my main contribution to the digital humanities degree we recently set up at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Cool Code, Bro: Brogrammers, Geek Anxiety and the New Tech Elite

Journalist Nick Parish recently published an e-book on privilege, sexism, and heteronormativity in high tech called: Cool Code, Bro: Brogrammers, Geek Anxiety and the New Tech Elite. In it, he discusses how the changing landscape of the American economy has helped shift the culture of tech.

In the past three decades, we’ve seen the leading edge of the software industry go from privileging whiz kids to bad boys. In our attempts to come to grips with the new postindustrial age as workers and consumers, we’ve found that we’re becoming more and more wary of the hero stories coming out of Silicon Valley. What once seemed like boyish irreverence for social etiquette now seems an antisocial force that may be inimical to the very industry our economy relies upon. As the model of geek-chic has changed, so has the meaning. Or has it? Parish tries to figure all of this out, while giving a brief primer on how high technology and privilege interact in some disturbing ways.

His e-book is free to download today. Full disclosure: I was interviewed by Parish for this work and several of my articles are referenced within it, which how I know about it. You can read my writings on the subject here, here, and here. I’d also recommend the work of several others referenced in Parish’s e-book, particularly Kate Losse and Sapna Cheryan.

Global English, Political Speech, and Public Humanities

One of my great pleasures over the course of this semester was being able to introduce undergraduates in my Filming the Past class to the amazing work of graduates in the Humanities Department’s Technical Communication program within the Program in Technology and the Humanities. My class not only teaches students through the medium of oral history and documentary film, but asks them to actively engage the public by creating in these mediums and sharing the products of their intellectual development. In that spirit, I’d like to highlight two “podcast-style” interviews students did with young faculty in the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Humanities Department.

One group of students interviewed recent Ph.D. and current Visiting Assistant Professor, Halcyon Lawrence, who works on speech intelligibility. Specifically, Prof. Lawrence asks the question: why do so many of our new, convenience-enabling technologies make life harder for the majority of English speakers? Speech recognition systems deployed worldwide, from Siri to your credit card’s voice prompts, are modeled on, and take for granted, American English or British accents as “standard English”–despite the fact that most English speakers today do not learn English in America or the UK. As English becomes our economic and technological “lingua franca,” how can we solve problems of speech intelligibility that are increasingly becoming embedded in our global technological infrastructure? Prof. Lawrence’s work offers a window into this fascinating problem and potential solutions:

Direct link to interview

Graduate Student Andrew Roback focuses on a different kind of speech: political speech on twitter. In particular, he asks, how do organizations wield 140 characters and what do they expect to get out of social networking? Though much lauded in the popular press for being a political game changer (cf. the conversations about Twitter in the “Arab Spring”), what exactly do we know about political influence on Twitter and about who has control and who doesn’t?

Direct link to interview

Inventing America: Black History

Inventing America: A chronological selection of Black Americans’ impacts in politics, law, medicine, technology, art, and culture         

This post has a timeline with more information and resources to accompany the Black History Month timeline poster you may have seen on campus at Illinois Institute of Technology. Continue reading

What I’ve Been Talking About…

Now that the term’s finally ended, I’m gratified to be able to reflect on what I’ve been up to for the past few months, in terms of conferences and presentations. This Fall was a really interesting time for me, because in addition to presenting at conferences that are old standbys for me, like the Society for the History of Technology, I was also glad to have the opportunity to make new connections in fields ranging from digital humanities to queer studies.

Here’s what I’ve been up to, with some links to available online versions of presentation materials where possible: Continue reading