Aspray’s "Writing Computer and Information History"
Sr. Research Fellow and former CBI Associate Director William Aspray publishes his latest book on the fields of computing history and information history.
MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (07/11/2024) —This past month Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) Senior Research Fellow William Aspray published a path breaking historiographical edited volume, Writing Computer and Information History: Approaches, Connections, and Reflections (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024). No scholar has contributed as valuable a body of scholarship to the fields of computing history and information history as Aspray has, and no scholar is in a better position to assemble a distinguished team of computer historians and information historians to reflect on methods, craft, and literature. As such, this much needed book delivers strongly.
The history of computing as an academic enterprise began to gain early momentum with the launch of three institutions at the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s—the Charles Babbage Institute, the Computer History Museum of Boston, and Annals of the History of Computing.
In 1980, CBI, following a call for proposals to universities, selected the University of Minnesota (UMN) as its permanent home. Minnesota beat out other excellent schools based on its strengths and deep commitment from both a standout History of Science and Technology (HST) Ph.D. Program and a top University Library. CBI is a partnership between the College of Science and Engineering, home of HST, and University Libraries at UMN. University Libraries, UMN is in the top fifteen in academic libraries nationally, and it is ranked even higher in Archives and Special Collections, where we have unparalleled facilities and personnel.
Under its founding Director Arthur L. Norberg, CBI launched its archival collecting, oral history, research, and fellowship programs. In 2018, I (along with CBI Archivist and Curator Amanda Wick) strategically repositioned CBI as the interdisciplinary “Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information, and Culture.” With this change, historical research, archives, and oral history remain the institute’s core, richly complemented by interdisciplinary programming on the history and social study of the digital world, such as events (like “Just Code,” and “Automation by Design,”) and publications (Interfaces).
The Computer History Museum (CHM) of Boston relocated to Mountain View, California, to become CHM. It has an unparalleled collection of artifacts and tremendous principal and rotating exhibits. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing is an impactful journal that evolved from writings by pioneers on “firsts,” and a handful of scholarly articles by the earliest academic computer historians in the 1980s—including Aspray, Martin Campbell-Kelly, Peggy Kidwell, and Paul Ceruzzi—to a diverse scholarly history journal from the 2000s forward.
Aspray was the first CBI Tomash Fellow, and Ceruzzi was the second. Norberg soon hired Aspray, his doctoral degree relatively fresh in hand, as CBI’s first Associate Director, and Bruce H. Bruemmer joined as the first CBI Archivist. Aspray served on the Annals Board, helped CBI thrive in its first decade, and went on to a number of distinguished leadership and academic roles, including: Director of the IEEE History Center, Executive Director of Computer Research Association, Professor of Informatics at Indiana University, Professor of Information at the University of Texas School of Information, and Professor of Information Science at the University of Colorado. Upon his retirement from teaching at Colorado, and returning to his institutional roots, Aspray joined us as a Senior Research Fellow at CBI. We are so grateful for his continuing service in this role and our CBI Fellows programs are incredibly important to the institute and its work.
Aspray’s range of experience in information studies, information science, information history, and computer history make him uniquely qualified to produce such a historiographical book on Writing Computer and Information History. His deep reflections, historiographical sense, experience as an editor (two dozen plus books and his past service as the Editor in Chief of Information and Culture), and the incredible colleagues he assembled as authors, make this volume shine throughout.
The book has four sections: “The Master Narratives,” “Creating a New Story of Information History,” “Reshaping the Mature Story of Computing History,” and “Broadening Computer and Information History.” Unlike volumes where themes are constructed from selected papers brought together initially by an event’s call, Aspray recruited the authors who could usefully explore these larger historiographical themes, such as past CBI Tomash Fellow Thomas Haigh, who contributes a chapter entitled, “Writing the Big Story.” Haigh cogently discusses the field, the context to and conceptualization of his co-authoring a recent survey on the history of computing with Paul Ceruzzi, A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021), and another leading survey (now with four editions) on the topic, Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
I was honored to join the first and second edition authors, Martin Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, of Computer: A History of the Information Machine, on the substantially revised and expanded third and fourth editions (along with fellow co-authors Nathan Ensmenger, Honghong Tinn, and Gerardo Con Diaz, the latter two were co-authors with Martin, Bill, myself, and Nathan only on the 4th edition, Routledge, 2023). Haigh insightfully analyzes the narrative frameworks and scaffoldings of our Computer and his co-authored A New History of Modern Computing. In the course of his discussion, he agrees with an unnamed colleague who stated that producing such a survey as he did with Ceruzzi is simultaneously “important” and “thankless.” While I agree with his assessment that surveys do not create “buzz,” or have an opportunity for “book awards,” I have a bit of a different take.
In addition to collaborating with stellar colleagues, I personally found (and find) it incredibly rewarding to co-write a textbook/survey that is then read by many thousands of students in history, information studies, other disciplines, and by the larger public (and to draw on recent literature to extend its coverage and value). In this endeavor, I never saw it as thankless, and I definitely never saw it as producing a “master narrative.” Instead, I viewed it as an effort to produce a broad, coherent, useful, accessible, and thought-provoking narrative, and I expect and hope there will be more focused surveys as the field further evolves, such as on the social history of computing and information. There already are excellent edited volumes along these lines in Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip, eds., Your Computer is On Fire (MIT Press 2021) and Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick, eds., Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society (Johns Hopkins University Press). Gerardo Con Diaz and I were thrilled to publish Abbate and Dick’s tremendously insightful volume in our Johns Hopkins University Press Studies in Computing and Culture book series.
Our (Con Diaz and my) Just Code (forthcoming, and also in the JHUP series) is another interdisciplinary volume focused on power, inequality, social history, and critical software and platform studies. We were fortunate to assemble an amazing team of historically minded interdisciplinary authors--leading historians, sociologists, anthropologists, communication, and media studies scholars of technology. Hopefully, scholarship such as these three edited volumes, as well as a growing body of strong articles in journals, including our forthcoming special issues of the Annals to come out our (Con Diaz, Colette Perold, and Honghong Tinn and my) symposium “Automation by Design,” will help to serve as building blocks to make a future social history of computing survey textbook (or multiple ones) richer and more likely. There should be more decentered and diverse narratives and surveys for the immense and growing domain of computing and information history and software studies, especially so as different social groups in this US and around the world experience digital technology in vastly diverse ways—from tools of power to weaponized mechanisms of surveillance and oppression. This is true of the long history of computing and information, but especially so over the past decade as the “magnificent” (or more appropriately, the “malevolent”) seven have spawned an accelerating inequality that has made IT corporatocracy a major contributor to the worst of late capitalism.
One way of broadening computer and information history is to understand it in different framings and realms. Valerie Schafer and Matthew Jones’ chapters in Aspray’s volume do just that. Schafer, accomplishes this in “Writing the History of Telecommunication and Data Networks,” and Jones in “Writing Data into Histories of Computing and Information.” This approach also is followed in Philip Doty and Aspray’s “Writing Law and Public Policy into Computing and Information History,” Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly’s “Writing Economic History of Computing,” and CBI Senior Research Fellow James Cortada’s “Writing Information History Using New Frameworks, Theories, and Approaches.” These terrific chapters highlight ways in which narrative and theory are interwoven, and how historiographical understandings of computing and information are enhanced through careful attention to political, economic, social, and cultural constructs and contexts.
As Aspray points out in his preface, information history has disciplines that long predate the history of digital computing, including the history of books and the history of libraries. The emergence and evolution of information schools out of library schools began with the pioneering gang of four, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Drexel, and Rutgers in the 1970s and 1980s, and then expanded rapidly from the mid-1990s forward. The iSchool movement and its vision for interdisciplinarity has grown as digital studies in communication, media studies, ethnography, and other specialties have grown. This, of course, has added to the inclusivity and complexity of computing and information history, spawning both intellectual rewards and challenges.
I enjoyed all the chapters in this impressive book, and stylistically, I found Laura Skouvig’s “Writing Information History from the Perspective of Rhetorical Genre Theory, and Geoffrey C. Bowker and John Leslie King's “An i for an I: Call and Response for the iSchools,” especially creative and engaging. The former is a journey into history and rhetoric in our digital world that emphasizes that, “documents such as laws and instructions are socially, culturally, and ideologically embedded in their concrete historical contexts,” and information is “…understood as utterances and as reified items.” (p. 125, 126).
Meanwhile, Bowker and King, explore the story and meanings of “Dream,” (its iSchool context) and provide an insightful “call” and “response” structured topical discussion of iSchools’ emergences and trajectories. These two leaders in information studies quote a referee of their chapter who succinctly stated a critique, “this is a gossipy story told over drinks at a conference.” (p. 131). Regarding style, the referee hits the mark, but to me it is this very style that helps to make the chapter so creative and engaging to read. I have enjoyed and learned from “gossipy stories” over drinks at conferences many times, but rarely if ever have they been as enlightening as this. While the style might be informal, the co-authors offer wisdom throughout in their terrific and inspired chapter.
The book also has chapters from two of the most talented historians and information scholars in the profession, Matthew L. Jones, and Greg Downey. Both are especially gifted at framing familiar technological and intellectual terrain in thought-provoking new ways. For Jones that is looking at how to write about data in history and as history. As he points out, data, of course, is a human-creation, yet it often is written about divorced from its contexts—either it is presented with limited framing or a monolithic one. Jones deftly argues that we need to understand data from different disciplinary angles including history, sociology, policy, philosophy, and ethics. I could not agree more—it is the very reason why we renamed and repositioned CBI as interdisciplinary.
For those who have not read it yet, in addition to this terrific chapter, I highly recommend Chris Wiggins’ and Jones’ How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms (Norton, 2023), an absolutely wonderful book in which this chapter in part draws.
Jones’ chapter works particularly well paired with Downey’s, as the latter focuses on space and spaces and how they exist as “laboratories” in the creation and packaging of data as knowledge. In other words, Downey is concentrated on data’s geographical uses, deployments, contexts, and movements. He poses such important questions of how do sociotechnical networks and cyberinfrastructures shape our conception of space and spaces? And what are the implications for geographical information systems in the study of history?
For the disciplines of information history and computer history, which by now are mature, historiographical treatments remain surprisingly sparse. Aspray credits the work of W. Boyd Rayword and Michael Mahoney for their early and important historiographical work on information and computing/software, respectively. I completely agree and would add to it, Aspray’s insightful historiographical scholarship over the past few decades.
Additional scholars who also come to mind are those offering path breaking historiography of gender as part of their historical works. In particular, I am thinking of historians Jennifer Light, Janet Abbate, and Mar Hicks; and likewise on race, digital technology, and historiography, Eden Medina, Joanna Radin, digital media scholar Lisa Nakamura, and African American Studies scholar Ruha Benjamin; and on disability, Mara Mills and Elizabeth Petrick.
Reflecting on method, craft, and literature is extremely important, yet tends to be a brief interlude if it is present at all in published histories. Rather than a brief side show, refreshingly, in this book, it is the main act. Aspray brings to the stage seventeen talented and thoughtful scholars from different communities (iSchools, history departments, computer science departments, and management schools) to explore both the distinct paths and shared terrain of information and computing historiography. We owe Aspray much gratitude—or to carry forward the theatre metaphor, a standing ovation—for conceptualizing and editing this wondrous and much needed work of historiographical scholarship. Along with Aspray, we also owe thanks to all of the talented authors for their highly compelling historiographical essays. This should be a “must add” to everyone's summer computer history and information history/studies reading list.
Jeffrey Yost