Collaborative annotation document: Coover
Coover: A history of the future of narrative
Leave a reply
Monthly Archives: January 2019
Observations Regarding the Storyteller (Discussion Reflection 1)
Given that my group’s reading focused heavily on the people responsible for creating some of the first computing machines, such as Leibniz’s step reckoner or Babbage’s difference engine, and the actual logic behind how these machines work, I went into class assuming that that was going to be the main discussion topic. Hearing from the other groups about their readings encouraged me to begin to contemplate how the O’Regan reading was written to influence our more machine-centric views of it.
For example, I read about Lady Ada Lovelace in another book, The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson, and I recall reading a lot more about her personal life and the actual details surrounding her involvement with Babbage’s work. Because the book’s purpose was not so much to talk about the actual analytic engine, for example, it focused more on one of the humans involved in it, Ada Lovelace. However, in O’Regan’s work, while the humans behind the actual machines were discussed, they were done so in a secondary way. This fact is made even more evident by the way in which the section headings are divided. When I looked back at the titles of O’Regan’s sub-chapters, I noticed that the headings focused on the actual technology. Thus, even when discussing the same topics or even people, there is going to be a difference depending on who is telling the story.
I randomly found myself contemplating how history will be told in the future, given the technological advancements that have occurred for us to provide a more globalized telling of history. I am assuming that all of the information that is being put online, for example, may have a longer-lasting shelf-life than, papyrus documents, for example, which we spoke of during the first week of class. Will this mean that history in the future will be focused on more perspectives in general?
The humanness of computing (discussion reflection 1)
In our discussion on Monday, we talked about the humanness of computing. The first computers were humans who were able to perform complex calculations. Once we developed machines called computers, they remained an output of human developments, closely tailored to the needs of individual industries like business and the science. We often view technological developments as something that will drastically alter our way of life, revolutions that will change how we relate to each other and the world in an instant. Instead of remembering that humans developed them, we view technologies as independently imposing themselves upon society. As Mahoney puts it, “there is society strolling along, minding its own business, and, wham!, it gets impacted and is left reeling by a revolutionary technology, which changes everything overnight or in some similarly short time” (121). He proposes that history is actually much slower than instantaneous breakthroughs and dramatic effects. This is true; everything cannot change in an instant. However, the slowly building computing developments do still have drastic impacts on the way we live. The world may not have changed much the day the first iPhone was released, but my life is significantly different than it would have been 10 years ago due to my owning one. How does the speed of adoption of new technologies impact how they change our lives? Does the slow build of increasingly advanced technology mean that it becomes gradually irreversibly built into our lives rather than becoming a fad, briefly impacting our lives before fading away? Regardless of the pace at which we adopt new technologies, they will always be the result of human innovation.
Mahoney: The histories of computing(s)
Scholarship on computers has tended to focus on the history of machines, presenting the age of computers as a revolution of its own; the purpose of Mahoney’s piece is to decenter the machine and instead focus on the processes and what they represent. Scholarship has traditionally focused on a linear narrative of machines dating back from the abacus, to the mechanical calculator, all the way to the PC internet of today. This approach, in fact, ignores the context of the computer’s development and what is so significant about it. The development of computers is really the collective creation of various communities adapting the technology to their own functions. Before data processing for businesses became the primary function of computing, industries from science and engineering to military operations made use of various functions, assisting anything from improving workplace flow in manufacturing to automation of military control systems. Community development shows that people saw and expecting different uses from the tech, but historians haven’t focused on this.
The emphasis should be on software. Software reflects the real world and software engineers are required to thoroughly understand not only the software itself, but also the context of how the world is modeled. When these fundamentals lacked, a ‘software crisis’ occurred in the late 1960s. Understanding software requires precise analysis and interaction with computer behaviors, rather than its structure, and how they operate. As a whole, studying the history of computing should focus on what the development process looked like; what applications communities wanted and how they developed the technology to fulfill their specific needs. It should involve acknowledging that computers are an output of human goals and that computers, as tools, open up new possibilities but also limit the work for which we use them. Each aspect of computers has its own history that informs what it can and cannot do.
Work was divided evenly among Charles, Gabriel, Georgia and Sean, with Charles editing and posting the final outline.
O’Regan: Foundations of Computing (Chapter 3 )
This chapter summarizes the story of the origins of computing by focusing on several key historical figures including Leibniz, the creator of calculus and binary numbers, Charles Babbage, Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace, George Boole, and Claude Shannon.
Gottfried Leibniz was a German mathematician and philosopher. Using Pascal’s calculating machine as inspiration, Leibniz developed a more sophisticated device called the step reckoner which could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and the extraction of roots. Leibnitz also invented the binary system which used 1 and 0 to
Charles Babbage was an English inventor who created the difference engine which when given the solution to a polynomial, could then solve for the solutions to nearby values. Like Leibnitz, Babbage was interested in efficiently computing arithmetic statements and designed a machine that could compute trigonometric and logarithmic equations.
Lady Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, a famous poet, contributed heavily to the computing world through both her writing and her visions for the capabilities of computing. Introduced to Charles Babbage at one of his many dinner parties in 1833, Lovelace saw the prototype for his difference engine, which inspired her future communication with Babbage. In describing possible applications for the analytic engine, which was never actually built by Babbage, Lovelace wrote out a program, thought to be the first computer program, for a calculation the engine could do. Furthermore, she foresaw the possible applications for the machine beyond calculation.
George Boole, an English mathematician, published many papers contributing mathematics, but his most notorious development was Boolean algebra. Although it was a theoretical approach to computing, his work is the foundation of modern computing. Using these theories, Claude Shannon, an American mathematician, discovered that Boolean logic is the perfect model for switching theory and the design of digital circuits which underlie all electronic digital computers.
Sean→ wrote the introductory paragraph and the paragraphs on Leibniz and Babbage
Kate→ wrote the paragraph on Lady Ada Lovelace
Luis→ wrote the paragraph on Boole and Shannon
Grier-A Grandmothers Secret (Introduction) & Chapter 2
Introduction
The history of computers begins not with computers but with groups of people in very focused disciplines doing very specific and diligent work largely unnoticed by the masses. This is often overlooked and particularly erases the contribution that women played in the role of making computers the concrete, logarithmic machines they are today. The longevity and brilliance of the computer is attributed those who upon first glance appear they have no use for computers or computer science but instead find they are the very ones asking what’s the next set of limits to defy and what should we ask from computers in the future.
Chapter 2
Charles Babbage was an economist whose broad interests in economics, astronomy and literature lead him to develop an incipient computing machine called the Difference Engine. This device could perform simple mathematical operations and was mainly intended to compute squares. Babbage’s initial pioneering work in computing machines, using gears and levers instead of circuit boards, was a vital first step toward the modern computer we have today. Overall, the work of Babbage and his colleagues represents the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of computer science in its nascent stages. Moreover, this section serves to underscore the importance of the diligent work of people in computer science more than the machines themselves.
TJ did the Introduction and Gray did Chapter 2. TJ then submitted the blog.
Precursors to this iteration of CSC 105
This course has a long history of being offered and developed by the Computer Science Department at Grinnell. This syllabus is based most closely on previous iterations offered by Dr. Jerod Weinman and Dr. Ursula Wolz.
Welcome to our conversation
Writing is habit of attention and practice of thought. I find it to be an invaluable tool for learning and creativity. For this reason, informal writing is a key component of engagement in this course. Part of this informal writing is blogging, reading, and commenting on others’ posts. These forms provide the opportunity to practice concise writing for an engaged audience.
Blog posts are 200-300 words, written for an audience of our class and posted in public.
At the start of the term, you will be assigned to blogging group A or B. These groups will alternate posting and commenting from week to week.
Blog posts are reflections on our discussion-focused class meetings: what struck you as fascinating, puzzling, or connected to other ideas? What questions do you now have? What do you want to know more about? Response posts are an opportunity to practice returning to an idea to develop it further. These posts should not summarize discussion. They should develop your own insight into the ideas we talked about. Posts are due by 5pm the Wednesday after discussion.
Comments should respond to a specific point raised by your colleague in the blog post. You do not need to comment on every post. You need one thoughtful comment to one post. If you see that some posts have several comments and others have none, consider commenting on a post that doesn’t have any yet. Comments are an opportunity to practice reading and writing as engaged conversation, and besides that, it is fun to know that other people are reading what you wrote. Comments are due by 5pm the Friday following the discussion.
Reading summaries are more than 300 words and convey the significance of the reading to which you were assigned. This should be in grammatically complete sentences for the most part, and direct quotation can be no more than 10% (i.e. 30 words). The title of the post should follow the format Author Last Name, Title of Reading. Due via blog post by 5pm Monday, categorized as “reading.” Must include a description of how labor was divided.
