UWO Information History Reading Group

Note: Meeting times CHANGED to 12:30 to 3:30.

During June and the first half of July 2012 I am resident in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies of the University of Western Ontario as the “Jean Tague Sutcliffee Visiting Scholar.” FIMS requested me to teach a course as well as giving a public lecture, and we came up with a compressed doctoral  seminar on “Histories of the Information Age.” You can see more about me and my interests at www.tomandmaria.com/tom.

The course is running, but with only one student enrolled it seemed that (1) this might not be optimal as a way of letting me share ideas and expertise with the student community, and (2) discussion would benefit from having more people present.

Therefore I have created an informal Information History Reading Group to meet concurrently with a revised version of the class schedule, twice a week from June 11 to July 12. This is open to all, including students at all levels and faculty.

Meeting times are 12:30 to 3:30. Most meetings are Monday and Thursday, but a few are shifted because of holidays or other commitments. Meetings take place in classroom 16A in the basement of Middlesex College next to the graduate club.

Readings and schedule are below. Most of these will be available via a Dropbox.com account that I am happy to share with anyone who would like to attend. Feel free to attend just one meeting of the group or several. Email me at thaigh@computer.org for access to the readings. The content skews a little more towards my own articles than a regular course would, but as I am here only temporarily that seems excusable.

NB: full content for the last five meetings will be added soon. The latest content will always be at www.sigcis.org/uwo.

Schedule of Meetings

1: The Early Information Society. June 11

  • John, Richard R. 2000. "Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age." In A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, edited by Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Headrick, Daniel. 1981. “The Submarine Cable,” chapter in The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  • Standage, Tom. 1999. The Victorian Internet. New York: Berkley Books. Chapters 5, 6, 9.
  • Yates, JoAnne. "Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the Industrial Age." In A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, edited by Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Campbell-Kelly, Martin. 1994. "The Railway Clearing House and Victorian Data Processing." In Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, edited by Lisa Bud-Frierman. London: Routledge.

2: Cybernetics and War. June 13 (Note, WEDNESDAY)

  • Agar, Jon. 2003. “An Information War,” Chapter 6 of The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Galison, Peter. 1994. "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision." Critcal Inquiry no. 21 (Autumn):228-266.
  • Berkeley, Edmund C. 1949. Giant Brains or Machines That Think. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Chapters 1-4. 7, 10-11
  • Kline, Ronald R. 2011. "Cybernetics, Automata Studies, and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing no. 33 (4):5-16.
  • Bowker, Geof. 1993. "How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies." Social Studies of Science no. 23:107-127

3: The Political Economy of Administrative Computing, June 18

  • Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray. 1996. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York, NY: Basic Books. Chapters 4-6 only.
  • Haigh, Thomas. 2001. "The Chromium-Plated Tabulator: Institutionalizing an Electronic Revolution, 1954-1958." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing no. 23 (4):75-104.
  • Haigh, Thomas. 2001. "Inventing Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950-1968." Business History Review no. 75 (1):15-61.

4: Networking & Interactive Computing As Cold War Techologies, June 21

  • Haigh, Thomas. 2010. "Computing the American Way: Contextualizing the Early US Computer Industry." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing no. 23 (2):8-20.
  • Edwards, Paul N. 1996. “SAGE,” chapter 3 of The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Bardini, Thierry. 2000. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Chapters 4 & 5.
  • Abbate, Janet. 1999. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chapters 1-2.

5: Hacker Culture & Personal Computing, June 25

  • Cringely, Robert X. 1992. Accidental Empires : How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Chapters TBA.
  • Turner, Fred. 2006. “The Whole Earth Catalog as Information Technology” & "Virtuality and Community on the WELL," chapters 3 & 5 in  From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Douglas, Susan. 1987. “Popular Culture and Populist Technology,” chapter 6 of Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers: The Heroes of the Digital Revolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. Pages 17-77.
  • Turkle, Sherry. 1984. “Hackers: Loving the Machine for Itself” in The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
  • Wolf, Gary. 1995. The Curse of Xanadu. Wired Magazine, June, 137-202. Online: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.htm

6: Information Labor, June 28

  • Saxenian, Analee. "Silicon Valley: Competition and Community", chapter 2 of Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
  • Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine (Little Brown: 1981), chapters 2, 3 & 6.
  • Levy, Steve. "A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge", in Tom Forester, Computers in the Human Context, MIT Press, 1991: 318-326.
  • Haigh, Thomas. 2006. "Remembering the Office of the Future: The Origins of Word Processing and Office Automation." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing no. 28 (4):6-31.
  • Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs (Regan Books: 1995), chapter 1 (pages 1-42) Read it on-line.
  • Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents, City Lights, 1997: pages 17-32 & 95-121.

7: Internet History, July 3 (Note, TUESDAY)

  • Abbate, Janet. 1999. “From ARPANET to Internet,” chapter 4 of Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Haigh, Thomas. 2008. "Protocols for Profit: Web and E-mail Technologies as Product and Infrastructure." In The Internet and American Business, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, 105-158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Haigh, Thomas. 2008. "The Web's Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals." In The Internet and American Business, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, 159-200. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Russell, Andrew L. 2006. "‘Rough Consensus and Running Code’ and the Internet-OSI Standards War." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing no. 28 (3):48-61.

8: Information as a Concept, July 5

  • Kline, Ronald R. 2006. "Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of 'Information Technology' as a Keyword, 1948-1985." Technology and Culture no. 47 (3):513-535.
  • Winner, Langdon. 1991. "Mythinformation in the High-tech Era." In Computers in the Human Context, edited by Tom Forester, 82-132. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1997. "Farewell to the Information Age." In The Future of the Book, 103-38. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Haigh, Thomas 2009. "How The Computer Became Information Technology," unpublished draft including material reworked in a forthcoming book.

9: The Power of the Future, July 9

  • Flichy, Patrice. 2007. The Internet Imaginaire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chapters 1-4.
  • Haigh, Thomas. 2011. "Technology's Other Storytellers: Science Fiction as History of Technology." In Science Fiction and Computing: Essays on Interlinked Domains, edited by David L Ferro and Eric G Swedin, 13-37. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
  • Batiz-Lazo, Bernardo; Haigh, Thomas & Stearns, David, 2011. "How the Future Shaped the Past: The Case of the Cashless Society." Draft in the SSN repository http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1961542.
  • Evans, Christopher. The Micro Millennium, Viking, 1979. Chapters 5-7, 10-11 and 15-16 (pages 72-111, 146-175 and 236-262).
  • "The Boshwash News" (a collection of pages between chapters) in Hiltz, Starr Roxanne & Turoff, Murray 1978. The Network Nation: Human Communication Via Computer, The MIT Press, 1993. (1st ed: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
     

10: Histories of Information, July 12