Last class we discussed some of the larger themes and trends that we’ve encountered so far in our study of computing history. Using those insights, do the following essay assignment which is due by 9pm on Saturday October 5th (a small extension from the due date listed on your syllabus). Your comment will not show up immediately, as I have to review and approve them.
Pick 2 themes we’ve discussed in class and encountered in the readings so far. Write an essay that shows how these themes align, or how they may seem to contradict each other, making sure you have a clear argument which teaches us something new and shows change over time. Length: 450-650 words. (This question will be a good review for the midterm exam on October 10th, so it’s worth putting in a bit of time and effort to ensure you have a good argument well-supported by evidence.)
We’ve spent a fair amount of time in this class talking about how perception plays a major role in defining a disaster. For the unit on Windscale, the class did an experiment: initially, you found historical, contemporaneous news stories on this nuclear accident in the Times of London , without knowing any details of the event. At that point, I asked you to come up with an argument about what happened based on the 5 most interesting articles you found, which also formed a coherent narrative or had a similar theme. The idea was for you to put yourselves in the shoes of someone in Britain encountering the event as it unfolded and see what impression you got.
Next, you will read recent articles and watch a documentary about Windscale to see how only recently has the historical narrative of what happened started to solidify. For many years, what the public knew about the event was partial, incomplete, and inaccurate. At this juncture I want you to think big: what kind of a disaster was this? What caused it? And, would you have gotten this impression if you hadn’t watched the documentary or a similar historical narrative, but only seen the event unfold in news media at the time? What do your answers to these questions tell us about disasters that we might not already have understood?
These are all questions I want you to keep in mind as you write your next essay in the blog comments. For that essay I want you to focus on the following: How did your impression of the incident at Windscale change between the time you did your article search in the London Times and after seeing the documentary? Use specific evidence from your news articles (cite the article title and date of publication using parenthetical citations) and specific details from the film to support your argument. (500-600 words, due Monday, October 7th by 10AM.) Be mindful of the advice and comments I gave you with your grade on the first essay post.
As discussed today in class, you have a choice between two essay topics for this initial assignment. Choose one, and submit your comment by Saturday, September 14th at noon. Use parenthetical citations in the format (Author, page number) to reference quotes, statistics, or particular ideas from the readings.
Option 1:
After discussing Turing’s life and work in class, I asked you what being gay might have to do with the singularity, from the perspective of the history of computing. Write an essay that attempts to answer this question, using specific evidence and analogies from computing history that we have studied so far. Be attentive to historical context, but feel free to be creative with your argument in answering this question. Just be sure to back up your claims with specific historical details and evidence. (400-600 words)
Option 2:
Write an essay that discusses the similarities and differences between the Colossus, ENIAC, EDVAC and EDSAC. Make sure your essay puts the machines in their historical context by discussing what each one did and why it was important. Your essay must have a clear argument that tells us something new & non-obvious about the history of computing and shows change over time. (400-600 words)
A diagram of early computer “relationships” and influences that may be of help (click image for larger version):
Today in class you watched a documentary about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. You also read articles about the much more recent sweatshop tragedy in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Using specifics from the film and the articles you read, discuss some of the similarities between the Triangle fire and the Dhaka building collapse. Your essay should be 350 to 500 words and should have a clear argument. In other words, in comparing these two events, your essay should tell us something new and non-obvious that leads us to a better understanding of the history of labor.
I was recently interviewed for a BBC Radio 4 series on the History of the Office. I appear briefly as a talking head in episode 9, on the move to computerize offices in the 1950s through 1970s. You can take a listen here (available this week until Thursday, when the new episode will replace it).
Last spring my Gender and Technological Change class did a project on bathrooms and gender, using our campus as a laboratory.
You can read all about the rationale for the experiment here, but the short version is that we tried to look at how the built environment influences, and even enforces gender divisions, and how resources in the real world impact how people feel and express themselves in public spaces. This tied into larger class discussions about how seemingly neutral technologies create and enforce categories in society, rather than merely reflecting them.
The outcome of the project was a variety of visualizations of the data the class collected–including graphs, charts, and spreadsheets. Perhaps the most impressive and useful one was the google map that drew on the class’s research. For those who might not be familiar with the abbreviated names for each campus building, an IIT campus map is available here.
(Note: Data is incomplete for the Life Sciences Building (LS). The men’s bathrooms for that building were unfortunately not counted. So although it appears on the map as *only* having women’s bathrooms, this is not the case. We hope to update that soon.)
Two students in particular took the lead in creating this resource: Carla Kundert, who did all the meticulous work of setting up the map and transferring information it, and Cruz Tovar, who created a unified spreadsheet of all the information collected by the class that allowed the data to be easily utilized for the map.
By giving information about the relative sizes and locations of men’s and women’s bathrooms, the map tries to show the inadequacy of facilities on campus for women, as well as the paucity of bathrooms designated as gender-neutral. It tries to comment on which bathrooms are easily accessible for users with mobility concerns, and also indicates which bathrooms on campus might be good targets for future conversion to gender-neutral spaces, noting which facilities have a single stall configuration.
It was the class’s hope that this map could serve as a resource for current and future IIT students, and perhaps jump-start a public discussion about how IIT’s administration can meet the needs of students more effectively when it comes to this basic and essential resource.
As the chart to the left shows, there are significantly fewer facilities for women than there should be based on women’s numbers in the Illinois Tech population: Though IIT still struggles to attract and retain women students and faculty, overall we are 37% women, with our undergraduate student body currently 31% women, and roughly 21% of our full-time faculty. Critically, this chart also shows the woefully tiny resources devoted to safe, gender neutral restroom spaces on campus.
For the final project in my STS class this semester, students were asked to make this class count towards their broader scientific and technical training by applying knowledge from the class to their major fields of study.
In addition to writing a paper that asked them to apply THREE different perspectives or theories that we studied this semester to a problem or issue from their major, they were asked to create a presentation that used a “digital humanities” tool of their choice to convey their argument, main ideas, and evidence to the class in a clear, concise way. These tools could be graphing tools, timeline software, etc.–anything that made it possible to convey the main points of the paper in a novel, compact way so that people could quickly and easily understand the goals and argument of the longer project.
Posted below, in the comments, are links to those presentations.
Due dates: Presentation needs to be posted in comments by May 1 at 6pm. The paper is due on May 2 in class (printout), as is the oral presentation. Remember, the presentation must be no longer than 10 minutes so that everyone has a chance to speak and ask questions.
For the most part, a binary gender system structures our understanding of society, and a sex/gender binary structures our understanding of technological and scientific pursuits. This class, however, has shown how these are largely misunderstandings and oversimplifications.
Even though we generally take these things for granted as key ways for understanding who and what people are, and how society should be organized, they leave a lot out. For instance, perspectives of GLBTQ people, perspectives that center the experiences of people of color, and perspectives that take socioeconomic class seriously all recede into the background, even though they are also formative to our social and technological experiences.
Drawing on the idea that there are alternate ways of understanding the world that do not assume these binaries, come up with a research question that seeks to explain an alternative view, and support it with historical evidence from your own research. Draw on work we’ve read in class and your own experiences to come up with your research question and an idea about what “alternate view” you want to explore. Be sure to cite all of your sources carefully.
Use the library guides on diversity, women, and history databases:
1. Use terms and concepts learned in class
2. Apply theories from class
3. Practice real research using physical and online archives and academic databases (no googling, no wikipedia).
4. Go beyond talking just about “men” and “women”
5. Be sure to cite your sources completely and clearly
6. Make an original and compelling point in a concise fashion
You final project will be due on April 29th (post the title of your Prezi and a link to it in the comments) and then delivered to the class on April 30th. It will include an oral presentation of no more than 8 minutes and you will use your Prezi to illustrate your points. (Prezi is a tool for hosting and sharing presentations online—see: prezi.com.) You will post your preliminary prezi to the blog on April 29th by noon, and then your revised prezi to the blog by May 1st at noon.
Throughout the semester in our STS class, we’ve looked at how technologies can be tools for consciously implementing social ideals, but also how technologies can sometimes unwittingly be agents for forming or producing those ideals rather than just tools for implementing them.
The readings for this week ask you to consider the question of how technologies shape our social goals and behaviors. You will read articles on cybermobs and cyberbullying, from Anita Sarkeesian, to Adria Richards, to Violentacrez, to Anonymous. You will see both good and bad elements and outcomes, and have to think long and hard about the fine line between free speech and harassment, and between productive self-organizing of concerned citizens versus vigilante-ish mob behavior. You will be asked to consider the force that specific technologies exert in these cases, and how these cases connect up, ideologically, with uncomfortable instances of unchecked technological use by our government, such as in the case of drone warfare or the Stuxnet virus.
In class on Thursday I will ask each of you to play an active role in leading the discussion, so please keep this in mind as you write your your blog comment and please come to class prepared to share specific insights. This class will be about your ideas and the connections you’re making between various class materials.
Members of Anonymous at a protest
In 500 words or less, discuss the connections between the items that I asked you to look at for this week, and connect at least one issue raised in these materials to a topic, idea, or theory that we’ve talked about this semester. At the end of your post, pose a discussion question or discussion topic for class on Thursday.
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.
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. Campus Map of the main buildings at Illinois Institute of Technology: http://www.iit.edu/about/campus_map.shtml
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.
which is due by 9pm on Saturday October 5th (a small extension from the due date listed on your syllabus). Your comment will not show up immediately, as I have to review and approve them.
