Norberg Grantees, 2021
The Norberg Travel Grant Program is an annual competition that supports talented scholars visiting CBI to use our archival collections. It is named after and supported by donors and endowed funds in honor of Professor Arthur L. Norberg, CBI’s Founding Director.
In this pandemic year of 2021, despite the archives being open with safety procedures and on an appointment basis, we knew travel from out of state and around the world to use collections in person would be minimal. Thus, CBI archivist and Curator Amanda Wick and I decided to offer a larger number of smaller ($400) remote use grants (to cover or help defray scanning fees, which are provided at a modest, at cost, basis by University Libraries). This has aided researchers in getting a major head start on their CBI Archives research, or even completing it—some projects and collections are more conducive to identifying materials for scanning based on Finding Aids. Below are the recipients and the projects.
Mr. Marc Aidinoff, an ABD student in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society at MIT, is researching a project, “A More Updated Union: The Computerization of Welfare and Reinvention of Liberalism,” which forms a part of his dissertation. He plans to draw from our Auerbach and Associates Collection and the Control Data Corporate Records, among others.
Dr. David Nofre, served on the influential “Soft-EU: Software for Europe” European Science Foundation-sponsored project. He just published “IBM and the Algol Project: The Politics of Early Programming Languages” in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (June 2021). His current project is “The Tower of Babel in the Historiography of Programming Languages.” He will be using our ACM Organizational Records Collection, and our now largest collection (eclipsing the massive Control Data and Burroughs collections), the Jean Sammet Papers.
Mr. Ulysses Pascal, an ABD in Information Studies at UCLA, is conducting research for his dissertation entitled, “Automated Futures: NASDAQ and the Global Circuits of Finance.” His research from CBI will take advantage of the Alex MacKenzie Collection, the Calvin Mooers Papers, and others.
Ms. Jamie Steele, an ABD student in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute, is researching, “Enacting the Fantasy Woman, A Social History of Natural Language Processing.” Her CBI research will draw on our vast National Bureau of Standards Computer Literature Collection, our Rand Symposia Collection, and oral histories, including those on gender and computing conducted by Past CBI Director Thomas Misa as part of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-sponsored CBI project.
Dr. Mate Szabo, a postdoctoral Research Associate at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, is researching a project entitled, “Edmund C. Berkeley and the Kalin-Burkhardt Calculator.” CBI has the Edmund Berkeley Papers, which provides an important core for this research.
Jeffrey R. Yost