In my Gender and Technological Change course the students are currently looking at how gender and infrastructure shape each other, and in particular, how technological infrastructure disciplines our thinking, and our bodies, into specific patterns.

The class read a great historical article on the moral, political, and economic wranglings to try to get public bathrooms placed in major U.S. and European cities during the late 19th and early 20th century. The catch? Public bathrooms for women were seen as outside the pale by most men in charge at the time, leaving city women in an uncomfortable situation. Professor Maureen Flanagan, department head here at IIT in the Humanities, shows in “Private Needs, Public Spaces–Public Toilets in the Anglo-Atlantic Patriarchal City: London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago” that attempts to keep public bathrooms for women out of cities were also attempts to shape women’s behavior into “respectable” patterns–namely to keep women out of public places and to keep their time out and about to a minimum.

We also looked at more recent bathroom projects: particularly ones designed to highlight or make more available genderqueer and trans-friendly bathroom spaces. In this regard, college and university campuses have often led the way, making specific policies to create gender-neutral and genderqueer-friendly bathroom spaces.

On a personal note, I still remember how my undergraduate institution lacked enough women’s bathrooms in many buildings–including the undergraduate library–because women had only been allowed into the main parts of the campus as (almost) equals in the 1970s and 1980s. And even in the 1990s, when I was a college student, genderqueer-friendly bathrooms were barely even acknowledged as an issue by the administration, despite student groups’ protests.

Here at IIT, we have a multi-layered problem: not only is the discourse on queer issues on campus relatively quiet, the infrastructure of the campus has long been designed to reflect the fact that the majority of IIT’s students and faculty are men. (Currently, women make up roughly 30% of the student population here.)

So our class did an experiment to try to see how these things were reflected in, and also shaped by, the physical infrastructure of the campus. Each class member went to a series of buildings on campus and made notes about the bathrooms, including the gender of the bathroom and accessibility issues. Once their comments have been collected below, we’ll put them up on a campus map using Google maps to create an online resource for the campus.

This week students in my STS class have each been asked to find a tool for representing humanistic research digitally. The tool will help them represent the knowledge they will gain from writing their final papers in a different medium–other than the text of an academic essay. The tool might help do this by representing insights graphically, or in a map, flowchart, or presentation of some sort.

The idea is that this companion piece to their final papers will be easily and quickly read, understood, and disseminated (most likely on the web). That way, everyone in class will be able to share their work more effectively. (Imagine how ponderous it’d be if all 15 people in the class had to just read everyone else’s paper!) In addition, this exercise will provide practice in representing ideas in a different way and, hopefully, it will be fun learning how to use a new tool in the process.

So, students, please post a comment that discusses the best one digital tool you found, and how it might help you represent the information in your final paper in a different way. You are also welcome to use tools that are apps for your iOS device or other devices. The tool does not need to be incredibly complex, but it should do a good job of representing information in a different way than an essay would. Remember that your final paper will ask you to compare and contrast readings from the course and apply some of the STS theories we’ve learned.  Your comment should include 3 things:

1) A link to the tool you’ve found and its name.

2) A discussion of how that tool is used and how long it will take you to learn it. (Will it require you to know HTML or PHP? Does it use a simple GUI? Is is driven by a spreadsheet?) Make sure the tool isn’t too fancy, expensive, or complicated for you to reasonably use.

3) A discussion of how you think you might use it, and what kind of insights it would be most useful for representing. What are its strengths and how do you envision drawing on or working with those strengths? Are there any weaknesses you will need to be careful about?

As mentioned in class, please don’t just Google around blindly. Please find out about digital humanities tools by looking through the specific websites in this storify I’ve put together for you and/or by searching through the following hashtags on Twitter:  #dh #digitalhumanities #transformdh #dhtools #digitalhistory #digitalhist #twitterstorians.

Comments are due by 5pm on 2/27. Have fun!

Learning how to make concise, insightful statements about difficult ideas remains one of the cornerstones of a college education. Perhaps more than anything else, processing and articulating difficult concepts as a way to start building new creative insights of one’s own underlies the point of higher education.

Which is why this week, my undergraduate STS class is going to be making comics.

Let me explain. Last week the class read Eden Medina’s award-winning new book, Cybernetic Revolutionaries. As with any interesting work, Medina’s contains difficult concepts and slippery ideas. Articulating these ideas is crucial to fully understanding them, but sometimes as we discuss works in class overly-verbose articulation slips into narrative and endless example. While narrative and example are useful tools with which to think, they are a means to the end of understanding, a way of getting to the kernel of insight that one eventually hopes to highlight.

That’s where the comics come in. We’ve had the class discussion already (all 2+ hours of it), so now it’s time to nail down the kernels of insight, stating them as compellingly and concisely as possible. In order to facilitate this, I’m trying something new: I’m asking students to use a comic-making app for their IIT-issued iPads to make a “one page” comic that crystallizes a point of their choosing from Cybernetic Revolutionaries. In particular, I’ve asked them to keep in mind how the theorists we’ve read so far (Winner, Latour, Pinch, Kline, and Balabanian) might be brought to bear on the text to create or clarify an insight.

Next week, I’ll post the most interesting comics here. In the meantime, I can’t help but think that this whole post could simply have been covered by a comic itself:

UPDATE: The students’ comics are in! Click below to expand the thumbnails and see some of the best ones…

Yesterday in class we discussed how technologies inhere particular power relationships through assuming certain gendered patterns of use, design, development, and deployment. Although we focused on the “male birth control pill” it was clear that the issues we were discussing about what makes a particular technology “male” or “female” were more complex.

We also talked about how this idea of the “maleness” or “femaleness” of a technology might have broader reach: the reason that the “male birth control pill” was seen as such was because the technology assumed a set of gender relations in which male users would have the power to control contraception. These ideas about what makes a technology more for men, or more for women, carry over into other usage cases, but in ways that are often subtle and harder to see. The idea of gendering technologies as a shorthand for describing the gendered power relationships they contain (at least in the eyes of the public) has broader reach, and impacts our understanding of more technologies than those that are just for contraception.

In a post of no more than 500 words and no fewer than 300, I would like you to discuss another technology that assumes–or has “designed-in”–a particular set of gendered power relationships. Explain your answer in relation to the concepts we’ve covered so far in class, and be sure to think about the idea of heterogenous engineering and the different meanings of “testing” when you’re thinking about what constitutes a “designed-in” set of relationships. (In other words, design doesn’t necessarily begin and end in the lab.) Your answer will need to be attentive to cultural and historical context; the gendered assumptions and power relations that you’re locating aren’t going to be universal or static. Take some time to think about other technologies we’ve discussed in class if you’re unsure of how to answer this.

Comments are due by 11am Friday as noted on your syllabus. I’ll approve the best comments later that day. Please return to the blog to take a look at your classmates’ responses and comment on 1 or 2 of them before class on Tuesday.

Last class we discussed readings from Langdon Winner, Norman Balabanian, and others that showed us how technologies, and in particular technological systems, have embedded within them certain social values.

We saw how technologies often promote certain values, or require certain social, economic, and political landscapes and relationships, sometimes without our even fully realizing that they do. Through looking at examples of Amish technological choices, we got some appreciation of how difficult it can be to take control of technologies in the service of a larger social or moral goal.

At the end of the class, I asked whether you thought there was some overarching social goal that Americans value as much as the Amish value fellowship, and whether that American social goal shapes, or can shape, our technological decisions. General class consensus was that Americans’ highest social value might be “freedom.” Balabanian and Winner, however, clearly show us how many technologies erode or deny freedom–particularly ones that have become part of our daily lives in industrial and postindustrial societies.

So, if Americans value freedom above all else, how does that square with our technologically-saturated society? Are these two things at odds? Or does it only seem so? Or perhaps, upon further reflection, you might come up with a different overarching social goal that seems to inform American technology? Write a concise blog comment of no more than 600 words that tries to answer these questions. Be sure that your response has an argument–in other words, make a clear, strong, and creative point in your essay that teaches us something new. After you’re done writing, please read some of your classmates’ responses and post a reply to at least one.

Your blog comments are due by 5pm on Wednesday, 1/30. Your comments will not show up immediately after you post them: I will approve the comments at 5pm 1/30 after everyone has had a chance to submit. Note: please put an extra line of whitespace between paragraphs in your essay, otherwise the text will run together (WordPress doesn’t recognize paragraph indentations).

I look forward to seeing your responses!