The Anthropology of Computing

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Course Description

This course examines computers anthropologically, as meaningful tools revealing the social and cultural orders that produce them. We read classic texts in computer science along with works analyzing links between machines and culture. We explore early computation theory and capitalist manufacturing; cybernetics and WWII operations research; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; the creation and commodification of the personal computer; the hacking aesthetic; non-Western histories of computing; the growth of the Internet as a military, academic, and commercial project; the politics of identity in cyberspace; and the emergence of "evolutionary" computation.

Level

Undergraduate

Instructors

Prof. Stefan Helmreich

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 sessions / week, 3 hours / session


Syllabus

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Requirements

Students will write three 5 to 7 page papers. Toward the third paper, students will give a presentation exploring the social meaning of an artifact from contemporary computing not covered in our reading - e.g. the iPod™, Xbox®, or Google™ search services.

Grading Policy

Each of the three assignments represents 30% of the subject grade. Students will also be evaluated on class participation, including discussion and in-class writing exercises (10% of grade). Punctual attendance obligatory. There is no final.

Required Texts

  • Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. ISBN: 9780262730099.
  • Edwards, Paul. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780262550284.
  • Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London: Routledge, 1998. ISBN: 9780415129633.
  • Ceruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780262532037.
  • Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780520208001.
  • Eglash, Ronald. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780813526133.
  • Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: iBooks, 2002. ISBN: 9780743444965.

Calendar

LEC # TOPICS KEY DATES

  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Medieval and Renaissance Cosmology and Clockwork
  • 3 The Industrial Revolution and Calculating Engines: Analytics of Capital and Gender Difference in the Work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace
  • 4 World War Two: Cybernetics, Communication, and Control
  • 5 The Cold War: Coding and Closing the World Paper 1 due
  • 6 Artificial Intelligence and the Construction of Cognition and Gender
  • 7 Artificial Life
  • 8 Postcolonial Recalculations: Legacies of African Mathematical Systems
  • 9 Computing Counterculture: Hacking and Gaming from PC to Internet Paper 2 due
  • 10 Properties of Identity and Collectivity in Cyberspace: Gender, Race, Nation, Opensource
  • Guest Lecturer: Anita Chan
  • 11 The Materiality of Networking
  • 12 DNA Computing Paper 3 due

Readings

When you click the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book (or other media) from Amazon.com, MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of this purchase and any other purchases you make during that visit. This will not increase the cost of your purchase. Links provided are to the US Amazon site, but you can also support OCW through Amazon sites in other regions. Learn more.

Required Books

  • Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. ISBN: 9780262730099.
  • Edwards, Paul. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780262550284.
  • Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London: Routledge, 1998. ISBN: 9780415129633.
  • Ceruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780262532037.
  • Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780520208001.
  • Eglash, Ronald. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780813526133.
  • Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: iBooks, 2002. ISBN: 9780743444965.

Assigned Readings

LEC # TOPICS READINGS

  • 1 Introduction

2 Medieval and Renaissance Cosmology and Clockwork

  • Gardner, Martin. "The Ars Magna of Ramon Lull." In Logic Machines, Diagrams and Boolean Algebra. New York: Dover Publications, 1968. pp. 1-27. ISBN: 000672054.
  • Channell, David. "The Mechanical World View: The Clockwork Universe, and Mechanical Organisms: From Automata to Clockwork Humans." In The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. pp. 11-36, 40-45, and 117-119. ISBN: 9780195060409.
  • Descartes, René. Discourses 1, 2, 4, and 5. Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637). Translated from the French by F. E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. pp. 27-44, and 53-76.
  • Pascal, Blaise. "The Wager." Pensées (~1660). Translated with an Introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966. pp. 149-155. ISBN: 9780140441710.
  • Swift, Jonathan. "A Voyage to Laputa." Chapter 5 in Gulliver's Travels (1726). Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2001. pp. 223- 231. ISBN: 9780140437348.

Film Excerpts Pi 3 The Industrial Revolution and Calculating Engines: Analytics of Capital and Gender Difference in the Work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace

  • Babbage, Charles. "Difference Engine No. 1 and of the Analytical Engine." From Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. 1864. In On the Principles and Development of the Calculator and Other Seminal Writings by Charles Babbage and Others. Edited by Philip Morrison, and Emily Morrison. New York: Dover Publications, 1984. pp. 33-72. ISBN: 9780486246918.
  • Schaffer, Simon. "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System." Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 203-227.
  • Plant, Sadie. Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1997. pp. 5-32. ISBN: 9780385482608.
  • Augusta, Ada. "Countess of Lovelace." Notes by the Translator on L. F. Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage. 1842. In Charles Babbage: On the Principles and Development of the Calculator and Other Seminal Writings by Charles Babbage and Others. Edited by Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison. New York: Dover Publications, 1984. pp. 245-252, and 284. ISBN: 9780486246918.

Film Excerpts Conceiving Ada 4 World War Two: Cybernetics, Communication, and Control

  • Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (1945): 101-108.
  • Wiener, Norbert. Chapters Introduction, I, V, and VIII in Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. pp. 1-44, 116-132, and 155-165. ISBN: 9780262730099.
  • Hayles, N. Katherine. "Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety." In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. pp. 84-112. ISBN: 9780226321462.

5 The Cold War: Coding and Closing the World

  • Edwards, Paul. Chapters 1-2, 4-5, and 8-9 in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. pp. 1-73, 113-173, and 239-301. ISBN: 9780262550284.

Film Excerpts Dr. Strangelove 6 Artificial Intelligence and the Construction of Cognition and Gender

  • Turing, Alan. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433-460.
  • Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London: Routledge, 1998. pp. 34-68. ISBN: 9780415129633.
  • Forsythe, Diana E. "Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence." In Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. pp. 35-58. ISBN: 9780804742030.
  • Halberstam, Judith. "Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine." Feminist Studies 17, no. 3 (1991): 439-460.

7 Artificial Life

  • Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780520208001.

8 Postcolonial Recalculations: Legacies of African Mathematical Systems

  • Eglash, Ronald. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780813526133.

9 Computing Counterculture: Hacking and Gaming from PC to Internet

  • Pfaffenberger, Bryan. "The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution." Anthropological Quarterly 61, no. 1 (1988): 39-47.
  • Ross, Andrew. "Hacking Away at the Counterculture." In Technoculture. Edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. pp. 107-134. ISBN: 9780816619320.
  • Taylor, Paul A. "Hacking Culture." In Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1999. pp. 23-42. ISBN: 9780415180726.
  • Ito, Mizuko. "Virtuality Embodied: The Reality of Fantasy in a Multi-User Dungeon." In Internet Culture. Edited by David Porter. New York: Routledge, 1997. pp. 87-109. ISBN: 9780415916844.
  • Flanagan, Mary. "Hyperbodies, Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk, and Strategies of Resistance." In Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. Edited by Mary Flanagan, and Austin Booth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. pp. 425-454. ISBN: 9780262561501.
  • Schleiner, Anne-Marie. Parasitic Interventions: Game Patches and Hacker Art. 1999.
  • Film Excerpts War Games

10 Properties of Identity and Collectivity in Cyberspace:

  • Gender, Race, Nation, Opensource
  • Guest Lecturer: Anita Chan Dibbell, Julian. A Rape in Cyberspace (Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One). Chapter 1 in My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999. ISBN: 9780805036268.
  • Turkle, Sherry. "TinySex and Gender Trouble." In Life on the Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. pp. 210-232. ISBN: 9780684833484.
  • Burkhalter, Byron. "Reading Race Online: Discovering Racial Identity in Usenet Discussions." In Communities in Cyberspace . Edited by Mark A. Smith, and Peter Kollock. London: Routledge, 1999. pp. 60-75. ISBN: 9780415191401.
  • Nakamura, Lisa. "Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction." In Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. pp. 1-30. ISBN: 9780415938372.
  • Bray-Crawford, Kekula. "The Ho'okele Netwarriors in the Liquid Continent." In Women@Internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace. Edited by Wendy Harcourt. London: Zed Books, 1999. pp. 162-172. ISBN: 9781856495721.
  • Sundaram, Ravi. "Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India." In The Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. (PDF)
  • Kelty, Chris. "Punt to Culture." Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004): 547-558.
  • Chan, Anita. "Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru." Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2003): 531-545.

11 The Materiality of Networking Abbate, Janet. "Introduction and White Heat and Cold War: The Origins and Meanings of Packet Switching." In Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. pp. 1-41. ISBN: 9780262011723.

  • Edwards, Paul. "Y2K: Millennial Reflections on Computers as Infrastructure." History & Technology 15 (1998): 7-29. (PDF)
  • Stephenson, Neal. "Mother Earth Mother Board: The Hacker Tourist Ventures Forth across the Wide and Wondrous Meatspace of Three Continents, Chronicling the Laying of the Longest Wire on Earth." WIRED 4, no. 12 (1996): 97-160.
  • Mitchell, William J. "Boundaries/Networks." In Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. pp. 7-17. ISBN: 9780262134347.
  • Kumar, Amitava. "Temporary Access: The Indian H-1B Worker in the United States." In Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Edited by Alondra Nelson, and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines. New York: NYU Press, 2001. pp. 76-87. ISBN: 9780814736036.
  • Helmreich, Stefan. "Artificial Life, Inc.: Darwin and Commodity Fetishism from Santa Fe to Silicon Valley." Science as Culture *10, no. 4 (2001): 483-504.
  • 12 DNA Computing Thacker, Eugene. "Biocomputing: Is the Genome a Computer?" In Biomedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. pp. 87-114. ISBN: 9780816643530. 
Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: iBooks, 2002. ISBN: 9780743444965.

Lecture Notes Notes for many of the lecture sessions are available in the table below.

LEC # TOPICS

  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Medieval and Renaissance Cosmology and Clockwork (PDF)
  • 3 The Industrial Revolution and Calculating Engines: Analytics of Capital and Gender Difference in the Work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (PDF)
  • 4 World War Two: Cybernetics, Communication, and Control (PDF)
  • 5 The Cold War: Coding and Closing the World (PDF)
  • 6 Artificial Intelligence and the Construction of Cognition and Gender (PDF)
  • 7 Artificial Life
  • 8 Postcolonial Recalculations: Legacies of African Mathematical Systems
  • 9 Computing Counterculture: Hacking and Gaming from PC to Internet (PDF)
  • 10 Properties of Identity and Collectivity in Cyberspace: Gender, Race, Nation, Opensource
  • Guest Lecturer: Anita Chan
  • 11 The Materiality of Networking
  • 12 DNA Computing (PDF)

Assignments Students will write three 5 to 7 page papers. Toward the third paper, students will give a presentation exploring the social meaning of an artifact from contemporary computing not covered in our reading - e.g. the iPod™, Xbox®, or Google™ search services.

Paper 1 For this paper, look at Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing and select an artifact from the history of computing that we have not dealt with directly in class (e.g. early software, the chip). Use some of the theoretical tools offered in the readings so far (e.g. Schaffer, Edwards) to provide your own analysis of the social context of this artifact. You may do more historical research, but there is no need to go off the deep end; use your judgment and consult with me if you need to. Include a bibliography.

Paper 2 Use the tools of gender analysis we have encountered in this course (e.g. in Adam, Halberstam, Flanagan) to further examine one of the following topics: artificial life, race and computing, hacking, or gaming. Include a bibliography.

Paper 3 Write an essay version of your presentation on the social meaning of an artifact from contemporary computing. Bring in theoretical tools from throughout the course, including those you may have found useful after the date of your presentation. Provide a bibliography.


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