Honghong Tinn

Assistant Professor

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Keller Hall 6-161

+1 612 6250242

htinn@umn.edu

 

Bio

Honghong Tinn is a historian of information technology and received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. Before joining the University of Minnesota, she held fellowships and academic positions at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany, the National University of Singapore, and Earlham College. Her research interests are in the areas of the history of digital electronic computing, Cold War, econometrics, and science, technology, and medicine in East Asia. Her book manuscript, Island Tinkerers: Emulation, Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry, explores the transnational exchanges of computing technology and expertise between Taiwan and the United States. She especially emphasizes the agency exercised by local Taiwanese engineers, scientists, technocrats, and computer users in bringing computing technology to and popularizing such technology in Taiwan. She is an elected member of the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology (2017-2019) and is chairing the International Small Grants Committee since 2017. She is currently an advisory editor for Engineering Studies and on the editorial board of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (Duke University Press).  

 

Teaching

Fall 2019

HSCI 3401/5401 Ethics in Science and Technology

CSCI 4921/HSCI 4321 History of Computing

 

Spring 2020

HSCI 1011: Digital World

Select Publications

Review of Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2018), Technology and Culture, Forthcoming.

“Making Community Legible, 2012-2018” East Asian Science, Technology, Society 13, no. 1 (2019): 5-6.

“Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Taiwan, 1959-1968,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 4 (October, supplement issue, 2018): 66-99.

“Charting the Cartography of a Global Community of EASTS Scholars,” East Asian Science, Technology, Society 10, no. 4 (2016): 341-342.

“From DIY Computers to Illegal Copies: The Controversy Over Tinkering with Microcomputers in Taiwan, 1980-1984,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 2 (2011): 75-88.

“Cold War Politics: Taiwanese Computing in the 1950s and 1960s,” Think Piece column, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 32, no. 1 (2010): 92-95.