Histories of Information, Communication, and Computing Technologies

Readings

SES #	TOPICS	READINGS
1	Introduction: Defining ICTs	None
2	The Military and Intelligence Agencies Histories of ICTs	Edwards, Paul. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780262550284. [Preview with Google Books] Douglas, Susan. “Technological Innovation and Organizational Change: The Navy’s Adoption of Radio, 1899–1919.” In Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience. MIT Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780262691185. Simpson, Christopher. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960. Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780195102925. Harper, Kristine. “Research from the Boundary Layer: Civilian Leadership, Military Funding and the Development of Numerical Weather Prediction (1946–55).” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (2003): 667–96. Lenoir, Tim, and Henry Lowood. “Theaters of War: The Military–entertainment Complex.” In Collection, Laboratory, Theatre: Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century. Walter de Gruyter, 2005. ISBN: 9783110177367. [Preview with Google Books] Cloud, John. “American Cartographic Transformations during the Cold War. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 29, no. 3 (2002): 261–82.
3	The Business and Government Histories of ICTs	Fischer, Claude. “Touch Someone: The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability.” Technology and Culture 29, no. 1 (1988): 32–61. Monmonier, Mark. “Aerial Photography at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration: Acreage Controls, Conservation Benefits, and Overhead Surveillance in the 1930s.” Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 68, no. 11 (2002): 1257–61. Haigh, Tom. “Inventing Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950–1968.” Business History Review 75, no. 1 (2001): 15–61. Abbate, Janet. “Government, Business, and the Making of the Internet.” Business History Review 75, no. 1 (2001): 147–76. Kline, Ron. “Resisting Development, Reinventing Modernity: Rural Electrification in the United States before World War II.” Environmental Values 11, no. 3 (2002): 327–44. Lauer, Josh. “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth–century America.” Technology and Culture 49, no. 2 (2008): 301–24.
4	The Entertainment and Cultural Histories of ICTs	Streeter, Thomas. “Blue Skies and Strange Bedfellows: The Discourse of Cable Television.” In Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting. New York University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780814799505. Dawson, Max. “Home Video and the “TV Problem”: Cultural Critics and Technological Change.” Technology and Culture 48, no. 3 (2007): 524–49. Stange, Maren. “Jacob Riis and Urban Visual Culture: The Lantern Slide Exhibition as Entertainment and Ideology.” Journal of Urban History 15, no. 3 (1989): 274–303. Marvin, Carolyn. “Community and Class Order.” In When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1990. ISBN: 9780195063417. Spigel, Lynn. “Media Homes then and Now.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2001): 385–411. Gitelman, Lisa. “Souvenir Foils.” In New Media, 1740–1915. MIT Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780262572286.
5	Histories of Proto–ICTs	Schwartz, Vanessa. “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. University of California Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780520201125. Lipartito, Kenneth. “When Women were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890–1920.” The American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1075–111. Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The Well and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512. Light, Jennifer. “Taking Games Seriously.” Technology and Culture 49, no. 2 (2008): 347–75. Wigley, Mark. “Network Fever.” 2001 Plotnick, Rachel. “At the Interface: The Case of the Electric Push Button, 1880–1923.” Technology and Culture 53, no. 4 (2012): 815–45.
6	Dissertation into Book	Turner, Fred. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The Well and the Origins of Virtual Community.” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512.
7	Metanarratives and Monographs – Taking a Critical Approach to Evaluating Your secondary sources	Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster, 2015. ISBN: 9781476708706.
8	The Uses of History	Hargittai, Eszter. “Radio’s Lessons for Internet. (PDF)” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 43, no. 1 (2000): 50–57. Light, Jennifer. “Youth, Old Media, and Political Participation, 1800–1971” In From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age. University Of Chicago Press, 2015. ISBN: 9780226262260. [Preview with Google Books] Wu, Timothy. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Vintage, 2011. ISBN: 9780307390998. [Preview with Google Books] (and response by Decherney, Ensmenger, et al. “Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed to Repeat It?” 2012.) Cuban, Larry. Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. Teachers College Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780807727928. [Preview with Google Books] Acland, Charles. “Curtains, Carts and the Mobile Screen.” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 148–66. Hirsh, Richard. “Historians of Technology in the Real World: Reflections on the Pursuit of Policy-oriented History.” Technology and Culture 52, no. 1 (2011): 6–20.
9	Technology and Knowledge	Hochman, Brian. Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology. University Of Minnesota Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780816681389. (Selections) Dutta, Arindam. A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno–social’ Moment. MIT Press, 2013. ISBN: 9780262019859. (Selections) Drucker, Donna. “Keying Desire: Alfred Kinsey’s Use of Punched–card Machines for Sex Research.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 1 (2013): 105–25. Lemov, Rebecca. Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity. Yale University Press, 2015. ISBN: 9780300209525. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Duke University Press Books, 2014. ISBN: 9780822356578. (Selections)  Robertson, Craig.Media History and the Archive. Routledge, 2011. ISBN: 9780415593274.
10	Past Sudent Papers that Got Published – How to Relate Classroom Readings to Original Research	Published articles by Angela Wu, Tommy Rousse, Rachel Plotnick, Ignacio Siles, Bernard Geoghean, and / or Katie Day Good. (See also prior reading by Dawson.)
11	Paper Workshop	None
12	Paper Workshop (cont.)	None