Nathan L. Ensmenger
School of Information
University of Texas
Office: UTA 5.450
Date: February 20, 2012 Category: publications
In the most recent edition of the Chicago Law Review, two former University of Pennsylvania colleagues and I published a long (20,000 word) review/response to Timothy Wu’s recent book, The Master Switch. At the heart of the review is the question “what does it mean to use history as a guide for contemporary policy?”
This is my first publication in a law journal, and the process was even more rigorous than the usual peer review. I have never before had a dedicated fact checker…
Full paper here.
Doctoral Research & Theory, Part II New Course
Date: January 10, 2012 Category: teaching
Becoming a professional academic means learning how to do research.
In this seminar, we will focus on epistemological concepts and processes of theory generation and testing as they apply to the study of Information. Our goal is to provide you with the tools needed to advance to the next level in your scholarly career.
In addition to learning about the theory and practice of research, you will also develop the professional skills associated with being a working academic, including presentation, publication, networking, and teaching. The readings will focus on the application of theories from the social and humanistic studies of science and technology to contemporary questions in information studies.
Date: January 09, 2012 Category: publications
Update: The Kindle Edition of The Computer Boys Take Over is now available on Amazon!
From Intuition Pump to Philosophical Zombies:
Thought Experiments in the History of Artificial Intelligence
Date: December 21, 2011 Category: research
From Descartes and Leibniz to Dennet and Searle, philosophers of the mind have struggled to understand the relationship between the mind and body. How did purely material structures and processes (the body) lead to second-order phenomenon such as self-consciousness (the mind)? Such seemingly metaphysical questions acquired new significance in the era of the electronic digital computer, when the possibility of creating “artificial” intelligence suddenly became a real possibility. In this paper, I explore the history of thought experiments in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, from the industrial thought mills of Gottfried Leibniz to the Turing Test of Alan Turing through the “Swampman” of Donald Davidson to the gedankenexperiment du jour, the “Philosophical Zombie.” In many respects, this is a continuation of the research on chess as an experimental technology in AI that I published earlier recently in Social Studies of Science.
Date: December 05, 2011 Category: publications
In an essay in the current issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, I explore the implications of the focus on “computing celebrities” in the popular press on the scholarly discipline of the history of computing. The recent passing of Steve Jobs has only exacerbated a long-standing tendency to focus on idiosyncratic, unrepresentative, highly mythologized geniuses such as the “two Steves” (Jobs and Wozniak), Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg. I compare such cults of celebrity to early history of science, which emphasized (generally apocryphal) “eureka moments” (Newton’s apple, Darwin’s finches, Archimede’s bathtub) at the expense of nuanced, situated historical biography. I argue that the history of computing can draw some instructive lessons from the ways in which historians of science have learned to both harness the popularity of the scientific biography for good and overcome its inherent limitations and hazards.
Date: November 01, 2011 Category: research
From the very earliest days of electronic computing, “flow diagrams” (later “flowcharts”) have been used to represent the conceptual structure of complex software systems. In much of the literature on software development, the flowchart serves as the central design document around which systems analysts, computer programmers, and end-users communicate and negotiate. And yet the meaning of any particular flowchart was often highly contested, and the apparent specificity of such design documents rarely reflected reality. In fact, some of the first software “packages” (commercial applications that could be purchased off-the-shelf) were used to reverse-engineer the flowchart specification from already developed computer code. That is to say, the implementation of many software systems actually preceded its own design! Using the sociological concept of the boundary object, this paper will explore the material culture of software development, with a particular focus on the ways in which flowcharts served as political artifacts within the emerging communities of practices of software development.
Date: October 21, 2011 Category: publications
My article “Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? A Social History of an Algorithm” is now available as an online preprint from Sage Journals Online. The print version will appear in the next issue of Social Studies of Science. Depending on your level of access to Sage Online, you can read an advance copy of the full version.
Update: The final version of the Chess as Drosophila piece is now available in the February 2012 issue of Social Studies of Science.
Date: September 15, 2011 Category: media
My research on the history of women in computer programming has been getting some national media attention lately. While I am told that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the unattributed “borrowing” of my work was disconcerting, to say the least. Nevertheless, if you are interested in my reseach on the “masculinization” of computer programming, it can be found in both The Computer Boys Take Over and in an essay published in a recent collection edited by Tom Misa called Gender Codes: Why Women are Leaving Computing (Wiley, 2010).
My response to the Washington Post editorial about the plagiarism of my work can be found here.
Date: September 09, 2011 Category: publications
In the current issue of Science, I have a review of a recently published collection of the late Princeton historian Michael Mahoney’s essays on the history of software [Histories of Computing, Harvard University Press, 2011, Thomas Haigh (ed.)] Mahoney was one of the intellectual giants of the history of computing. I studied with him in graduate school, and he was a friend and colleague for many years afterward. For any scholar of the information age, this is a collection well worth owning. Read the review: among other things, it is very likely the only time I will get published in Science.
A brief but insightful quote from the first of Mike’s essays to appear in the volume about the importance of studying the histories of computing: “What is truly revolutionary about the computer will become clear only when computing acquires a proper history.”
Date: August 22, 2011 Category: teaching
The history of the information age is about more than just the electronic digital computer. It is the story of a wide range of human activities, scientific practices, and technological developments. The story begins in the early 19th century with the emergence of new demands for communications and information management — from scientific researchers, expanding government bureaucracies, and increasingly national and international corporations. It includes not only “computers’’ (itself a large and diverse category) but data processing, communications, and visualization technologies, as well as people, practices, and organizational structures. In this new graduate seminar, we will explore the history of computing and communications in all of its forms and varieties. We will situate the computer in the broader history of technology, but also consider it from the perspectives of the history of science, labor history, and social history.
Date: March 22, 2011 Category: publications
In this month’s Communications of the ACM, I have a short “historical reflection” on the recruitment and training of programmers in the 1950s. The essay is a short gloss of the material covered in chapter two of The Computer Boys Take Over, “Chess-players, Music-lovers, and Mathematicians.”
Among other things, it discusses the use of aptitude tests and personality profiles to identify programmer talent. Employers didn’t quite know what they were looking for, other than the “twinkle in the eye,” the “indefinable enthusiasm,” that marked those individuals possessed by “the programming bug that meant…we’re going to take a chance on him despite his background.”
Date: March 01, 2011 Category: teaching
This summer I will be teaching once again my course on contemporary issues in computer culture and policy. The course explores the various social implication of information technology: social, cultural, political, and economic. By considering by a wide variety
of perspectives on the Information Revolution, we examine the relationship between new information technologies and changing notions of community, identity, property, and democracy. Topics will include intellectual property
rights, Linux and the free software movement, cyber libertarianism, and the rise
and fall of the dot.com economy.
Download the most recent version of the STSC 465 syllabus in PDF form