SIG/CIS at Dearborn

Who does history?  Who should do history?  Why do we (they) do it?  How are the choices of what to study made?  Who vets the resulting work? 

These questions provoke widely varying points of view. 

Just prior to the annual SHOT (Society for the History of Technology) conference at Dearborn, Michigan in November, the Special Interest Group for Computers In Society (SIG/CIS) had a spirited e-mail exchange on this topic.  The topic centered on the perceived historical flaws in Walter Isaacson’s newly published book, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, and what should/could be or have been done.  Views varied widely, from solid enthusiasm for a truly well-written, engaging book about “our topic” to real concern for the lack of involving the SIG/CIS leadership as reviewers prior to publication—essentially vetting the book.

The keynote speaker at the SIG/CIS meeting, Jennifer Light, tackled the question of “who” head-on, averring that there are (at least) five different communities who are focused on the history of computing:

1.     Historians of technology (us, in that room, as SHOT and SIG/CIS members)

2.     Historians of science (them, having their annual conference the same week in Chicago)

3.     Practitioners in the computing design worlds (architecture, computer-aided tools, etc.)

4.     Practitioners in the communications/media worlds (movies, games, iPhones, etc.)

5.     Journalists, analysts, and amateur historians of many stripes and origins

Light’s key observation, for my taste, was that none of these five groups talk to each other.   Bernard Carlson, professor and Chair of the Engineering and Society department at the University of Virginia, lent special emphasis to this point when he mentioned that the head of the National Academy of Engineering  (unnamed at the conference, but it was Bill Wulf) asked to get the SHOT periodicals, but after a year of reading them, he reported to Carlson that “I don’t understand anything they’re talking of.”

Help me, please!  The chairperson of NAE for America, the premier group of eight thousand engineers in America, himself a pedigreed PhD with long engineering experience, numerous patents, business success and accolades, could not relate to the issues, debates, or even vocabulary of the leading historians of technology of the world?  It’d be hard to make up this story, it sounds so ludicrous. 

Light continued, noting that at most, there are perhaps four hundred practicing Historians of Computing Technology in the world today, versus an observation by the most popular author in that field (Jim Cortada) who recently wrote that “we will come to see this field as the most pivotal historical point in civilization.”

Cortada has a superb little book about 'our craft'--"History Hunting"--wherein he notes: "in the case of the world of computers, we have had the problem that so few participants have been interviewed and so many thousands could be.  Computing pioneers also have had the bad habit of dying, even if many have lived into their eighties and nineties.  Because doing high-grade interviews is so expensive and time-consuming, we needed to find another way to get that task done if we were going to scale up to interviewing many people rather than just staying content with a few.  Remember, there are only several hundred professionally trained historians in the world looking at the history of computing, and the number of people they can interview is low....   (After CBI, CHM and the Software History Center collaborated, got a $600K grant from Sloan, and built a website, sought lots of folk, etc....) the project proved to be a partial success."  And that overstates the success, measured against the original goal.

So... an opportunity awaits!  Or maybe multiple opportunities.  Historians are too few, amateurs are too amateurish, practitioners are too self-absorbed, etc.  But... meanwhile we're losing valuable stuff.