Nathan L. Ensmenger
School of Information
University of Texas
Office: UTA 5.450
Category: media
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: February 26, 2011 Category: media
On February 28 I will be giving a talk at Stanford on gender issues in the history of the computing professions. The seminar is being jointly hosted by the program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (HPST) Program, and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
More details available here, and the full winter schedule for the STS seminar series is here.
Postscript: Although most academic talks go relatively unnoticed, in this case I got a nice write-up in the local newspaper. The slides from the talk are now available online.
Date: January 27, 2011 Category: media research
A couple of years ago I presented a paper at the University of Minneapolis on my ongoing research project on computerized decision models. Although the paper was ostensibly about computer chess, the talk took a conceptual turn, and focused on what I am calling the “politics of the algorithm.”
Since then I have given several different versions of this talk
The chess project will soon be published in the Social Studies of Science. In the meantime, here are the slides from the talk (recently updated), which I am posting as part of experiment in making aspects of my academic research more widely available.
Date: September 12, 2010 Category: media research
On September 13 I will be giving a keynote address at the Software for Europe conference at the Lorentz Center for the Sciences in the Netherlands. The talk will focus on the work practices of computer operators in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among other things, I will argue that computing is a much more human activity that we might otherwise imagine, even in the era of electronic computing. There were hundreds of thousands of computer workers employed in the first two decades following the invention of the electronic computer, and the “human element” in computing was frequently identified by contemporaries as the critical challenge facing the future of the commercial computing industry.
Date: February 22, 2010 Category: media
Academic careers are based on reputation, and for younger scholars at least part of that reputation is based on your online persona. But online personas are notoriously difficult to manage — unlike other forms of self-presentation, your online presence is only partially under your control.
On Monday, February 22, I will be speaking at the Graduate Student Center on the topic of managing your digital persona. Free lunch!
Date: December 10, 2009 Category: media teaching
In the last lecture of my Information Age course, I discussed the problem of privacy in the Internet era. As one of my examples, I referred to the popular campus blog Sleeping in Van Pelt which posts pictures of people – you guessed it – sleeping in Van Pelt Library. The next day, the site Sleeping in Van Pelt featured a picture of me lecturing in front of a huge video screen featuring an image of the website Sleeping in Van Pelt.
You see where this is going: next year, a website featuring me showing a picture of the website showing me showing a picture of the website…
An infinite number of ensmengers, going all the way down…
Date: August 06, 2009 Category: media
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was the best-selling academic book of the 20th Century, selling over one million copies in sixteen languages. As part of their introduction to the United States, a group of forty-one Fulbright Scholars from thirty countries is studying Kuhn at Penn this summer. I gave the introductory lecture on SSR, which was great fun. I rarely get to do philosophy of science anymore. The slides are here, but the animated version is even better: lots of astronomy and epicycles, along with a cameo by Homer Simpson.
Date: August 05, 2009 Category: media
This week I will be attending the IEEE Conference on the History of Technical Societies. This is part of a larger celebration of the IEEE’s 125th Anniversary. I gave a talk entitled “Engineering a Professional Identity: The Place of Professional Societies in the History of Computing.”
Date: June 05, 2009 Category: media
This week I will be in Copenhagen to comment on papers for a conference on information technology and work processes. An excellent program of papers on everything from software development practices to the history of computing in the banking industry. The full program can be found here.
Date: April 13, 2009 Category: media
On Tuesday, April 14, I will be responding to a screening of the documentary “To Dream Tomorrow,” which is about computing pioneer Ada Byron Lovelace, who is often referred to as the first computer programmer.
The film is been shown as part of a series called Women of Power, which includes documentaries about Hildegard of Bingen and the botanist Maria Sibylla Merian.
More information about the Lovelace documentary and its filmmakers can be found here.
Date: February 20, 2009 Category: media
This past evening I gave a talk for engineering week on women in information technology. Feminizing the field of computer science is some coverage of the event from the Daily Pennsylvanian.
Date: December 12, 2008 Category: media
The current issue of School of Arts & Science Frontiers magazine features a review of my recent work on the Internet and American commerce.
The article is written by B. Davin Stengel, and is called Doctors Without Modems? Technology Historian Nathan Ensmenger checks the pulse of the e-health revolution.
Date: December 12, 2008 Category: media
The Open Source Teaching Project represents an attempt to use Web 2.0 technologies and social networking to “create freely interactive media platforms which integrate academic and social content focused on critical thinking, college, and careers.”
Listen here to my interview with OST, where I discuss such diverse topics as “what is the history of technology,” “choices and technology,” “the problems with digital media,” and “doing research as an undergradute.”
It was a pleasure working with the OST. I regularly teach about open source projects, and have written a little about the lessons of open source for historians, but this is my first real open-source project.
Date: November 07, 2008 Category: media
This past year my cyberculture seminar happened to meet on Valentine’s day, and so we did a special session on online dating. One of the things to come out of that was an interview with a reporter from the Daily Pennsylvanian for its 34th Street Magazine. Here is her article entitled “Love in the Time of Facebook.” Good stuff.
Date: March 03, 2008 Category: media
This Tuesday, March 4, I will be giving a talk called “Cyborgs, Artificial Intelligences, and Meat Machines: Computers and the Reinvention of the Body” at Drexel University as part of their Great Works Symposium. The talk is from 3:30-4:50 in Curtis Hall, Room 340
The video of this talk is now available.
Date: July 16, 2007 Category: media
I just finished filming a segment for a documentary by local film-maker LeAnn Erikson. I was just one of the talking-head historians. The real heroes of the film are the women who worked as mathematicians and “human computers” during the Second World War (including those who programmed the ENIAC computer right here at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering).
View the trailer online.
Date: July 16, 2007 Category: media
Case Files in the History of Computing
This is the second in a series of symposium hosted by the Franklin Institute and the History & Sociology of Science department celebrating the opening of a new section of the electronic case files archives.
The focus of the presentation was on the early history of the computing industry, featuring key individuals including Hollerith, Burroughs, Eckert, Mauchly, Bardeen, Brittain, and Shannon. Professor Ensmenger provided a general overview of the history of computing.
The full video can be is running on the Research Channel.
Date: May 10, 2007 Category: media
On February 20th, 2007, Dr. Ensmenger will be giving a talk at the University of Wisconsin entitled “Neither Luddites nor Sages: Physicians and Professors as Reluctant Users of the Internet.”
The seminar is funded by the UW-Madison Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and sponsored by the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies.
See the full poster.
Date: December 13, 2006 Category: media
This paper was based on some research that I am currently developing on the history of decision technologies.
From the paper:
“It is also clear that no-one quite knows what to do with software; computer science focuses on software as algorithm; history of computer science is often told as old-style intellectual history; this is obviously insufficient, software sits uncomfortably between science technology; not a thing, an yet clearly constructed; invisible, ethereal, often ephemeral; also not clear what exactly constitutes software; programs, practices, people; software is perhaps the ultimate heterogenous system…
“And so his paper represents an attempt to think seriously about software as a material artifact, as a technology embedded in systems of practice, networks of exchange…”
Date: August 09, 2006 Category: media
The History of Communications in America
The Franklin Institute offers an electronic presentation of its Case Files, a collection of primary source documents that exists as an unknown repository of the history of science and technology. The University of Pennsylvania’s Department of History and Sociology of Science hosted a Symposium to discuss the historical, scientific, and educational merit of the Case Files, which date from the 1820s, as a modern day resource for undergraduate, graduate, and professional scholars, as well as K-12 students.
Date: May 10, 2005 Category: media
Paul Edwards – Associate Professor, School of Information; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Nathan Ensmenger – Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
As rapidly as computer technology has changed, so have our hopes for – and fears about – its potential. How do we imagine the place of computers in our lives?
Historians of science and technology Nathan Ensmenger and Paul Edwards join Chicago Public Radio’s Gretchen Helfrich for the discussion. Ensmenger writes and researches on the history of software, artificial intelligence, and the information age. Edwards is author of The World in a Machine: Computer Models, Data Networks, and Global Atmospheric Politics.