Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter one is about digital writers’ challenge to the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early 21st century.
Chapter one is about digital writers’ challenge to the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early 21st century.
Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262033985
- eISBN:
- 9780262334426
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262033985.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This book explores the conception, design, construction, use, and afterlife of ENIAC, the first general purpose digital electronic computer. ENIAC was created and tested at the University of ...
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This book explores the conception, design, construction, use, and afterlife of ENIAC, the first general purpose digital electronic computer. ENIAC was created and tested at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1946, then used at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland until 1955. Unlike most discussion of early computers, this book focuses on ways in which ENIAC was used, and the relationship of its design to computational practice, particularly its use between 1948 and 1950 to conduct the first computerized Monte Caro simulations for Los Alamos. ENIAC’s first team of operators were all women, and the book probes their contribution to the machine’s achievements and the development of computer programming practice. ENIAC’s users changed its hardware and transformed its configuration over time, so that it eventually became the first computer to execute a modern program, defined by the authors as one following the “modern code paradigm” introduced in John von Neumann’s seminal 1945 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” They draw on new archival evidence to document the development of this idea and its relationship to work on ENIAC. They also use ENIAC to probe the construction of historical memory, looking at ways in which a bitter succession of legal battles around patent rights shaped later perceptions.Less
This book explores the conception, design, construction, use, and afterlife of ENIAC, the first general purpose digital electronic computer. ENIAC was created and tested at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1946, then used at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland until 1955. Unlike most discussion of early computers, this book focuses on ways in which ENIAC was used, and the relationship of its design to computational practice, particularly its use between 1948 and 1950 to conduct the first computerized Monte Caro simulations for Los Alamos. ENIAC’s first team of operators were all women, and the book probes their contribution to the machine’s achievements and the development of computer programming practice. ENIAC’s users changed its hardware and transformed its configuration over time, so that it eventually became the first computer to execute a modern program, defined by the authors as one following the “modern code paradigm” introduced in John von Neumann’s seminal 1945 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” They draw on new archival evidence to document the development of this idea and its relationship to work on ENIAC. They also use ENIAC to probe the construction of historical memory, looking at ways in which a bitter succession of legal battles around patent rights shaped later perceptions.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter two moves to poets’ engagement with the transition from the late 1960s’ emphasis on openness and creativity in computing to the 1980s’ ideology of the user-friendly Graphical User Interface.
Chapter two moves to poets’ engagement with the transition from the late 1960s’ emphasis on openness and creativity in computing to the 1980s’ ideology of the user-friendly Graphical User Interface.
Subrata Dasgupta
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199309412
- eISBN:
- 9780197562857
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199309412.003.0008
- Subject:
- Computer Science, History of Computer Science
In 1900, the celebrated German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943), professor of mathematics in the University of Göttingen, delivered a lecture at the International Mathematics Congress in ...
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In 1900, the celebrated German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943), professor of mathematics in the University of Göttingen, delivered a lecture at the International Mathematics Congress in Paris in which he listed 23 significant “open” (mathematicians’ jargon for “unsolved”) problems in mathematics. Hilbert’s second problem was: Can it be proved that the axioms of arithmetic are consistent? That is, that theorems in arithmetic, derived from these axioms, can never lead to contradictory results? To appreciate what Hilbert was asking, we must understand that in the fin de siècle world of mathematics, the “axiomatic approach” held sway over mathematical thinking. This is the idea that any branch of mathematics must begin with a small set of assumptions, propositions, or axioms that are accepted as true without proof. Armed with these axioms and using certain rules of deduction, all the propositions concerning that branch of mathematics can be derived as theorems. The sequence of logically derived steps leading from axioms to theorems is, of course, a proof of that theorem. The axioms form the foundation of that mathematical system. The axiomatic development of plane geometry, going back to Euclid of Alexandria (fl. 300 BCE) is the oldest and most impressive instance of the axiomatic method, and it became a model of not only how mathematics should be done, but also of science itself. Hilbert himself, in 1898 to 1899, wrote a small volume titled Grundlagen der Geometrie (Foundations of Geometry) that would exert a major influence on 20th-century mathematics. Euclid’s great work on plane geometry, Elements, was axiomatic no doubt, but was not axiomatic enough. There were hidden assumptions, logical problems, meaningless definitions, and so on. Hilbert’s treatment of geometry began with three undefined objects—point, line, and plane—and six undefined relations, such as being parallel and being between. In place of Euclid’s five axioms, Hilbert postulated a set of 21 axioms. In fact, by Hilbert’s time, mathematicians were applying the axiomatic approach to entire branches of mathematics.
Less
In 1900, the celebrated German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943), professor of mathematics in the University of Göttingen, delivered a lecture at the International Mathematics Congress in Paris in which he listed 23 significant “open” (mathematicians’ jargon for “unsolved”) problems in mathematics. Hilbert’s second problem was: Can it be proved that the axioms of arithmetic are consistent? That is, that theorems in arithmetic, derived from these axioms, can never lead to contradictory results? To appreciate what Hilbert was asking, we must understand that in the fin de siècle world of mathematics, the “axiomatic approach” held sway over mathematical thinking. This is the idea that any branch of mathematics must begin with a small set of assumptions, propositions, or axioms that are accepted as true without proof. Armed with these axioms and using certain rules of deduction, all the propositions concerning that branch of mathematics can be derived as theorems. The sequence of logically derived steps leading from axioms to theorems is, of course, a proof of that theorem. The axioms form the foundation of that mathematical system. The axiomatic development of plane geometry, going back to Euclid of Alexandria (fl. 300 BCE) is the oldest and most impressive instance of the axiomatic method, and it became a model of not only how mathematics should be done, but also of science itself. Hilbert himself, in 1898 to 1899, wrote a small volume titled Grundlagen der Geometrie (Foundations of Geometry) that would exert a major influence on 20th-century mathematics. Euclid’s great work on plane geometry, Elements, was axiomatic no doubt, but was not axiomatic enough. There were hidden assumptions, logical problems, meaningless definitions, and so on. Hilbert’s treatment of geometry began with three undefined objects—point, line, and plane—and six undefined relations, such as being parallel and being between. In place of Euclid’s five axioms, Hilbert postulated a set of 21 axioms. In fact, by Hilbert’s time, mathematicians were applying the axiomatic approach to entire branches of mathematics.
Subrata Dasgupta
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780199309412
- eISBN:
- 9780197562857
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199309412.003.0015
- Subject:
- Computer Science, History of Computer Science
The 1940s witnessed the appearance of a handful of scientists who, defying the specialism characteristic of most of 20th-century science, strode easily across borders erected to protect ...
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The 1940s witnessed the appearance of a handful of scientists who, defying the specialism characteristic of most of 20th-century science, strode easily across borders erected to protect disciplinary territories. They were people who, had they been familiar with the poetry of the Nobel laureate Indian poet–philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), would have shared his vision of a “heaven of freedom”: …Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. … Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), logician, mathematician, and prodigy, who was awarded a PhD by Harvard at age 17, certainly yearned for this heaven of freedom in the realm of science as the war-weary first half of the 20th century came to an end. He would write that he and his fellow scientist and collaborator Arturo Rosenbluth (1900–1970) had long shared a belief that, although during the past two centuries scientific investigations became increasingly specialized, the most “fruitful” arenas lay in the “no-man’s land” between the established fields of science. There were scientific fields, Wiener remarked, that had been studied from different sides, each bestowing its own name to the field, each ignorant of what others had discovered, thus creating work that was “triplicated or quadruplicated” because of mutual ignorance or incomprehension. Wiener, no respecter of “narrow domestic walls” would inhabit such “boundary regions” between mathematics, engineering, biology, and sociology, and create cybernetics, a science devoted to the study of feedback systems common to living organisms, machines, and social systems. Here was a science that straddled the no-man’s land between the traditionally separate domains of the natural and the artificial. Wiener’s invention of cybernetics after the end of World War II was a marker of a certain spirit of the times when, in the manner in which Wiener expressed his yearning, scientists began to create serious links between nature and artifact. It is inevitable that this no-man’s land between the natural and the artificial should be part of this story.
Less
The 1940s witnessed the appearance of a handful of scientists who, defying the specialism characteristic of most of 20th-century science, strode easily across borders erected to protect disciplinary territories. They were people who, had they been familiar with the poetry of the Nobel laureate Indian poet–philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), would have shared his vision of a “heaven of freedom”: …Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. … Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), logician, mathematician, and prodigy, who was awarded a PhD by Harvard at age 17, certainly yearned for this heaven of freedom in the realm of science as the war-weary first half of the 20th century came to an end. He would write that he and his fellow scientist and collaborator Arturo Rosenbluth (1900–1970) had long shared a belief that, although during the past two centuries scientific investigations became increasingly specialized, the most “fruitful” arenas lay in the “no-man’s land” between the established fields of science. There were scientific fields, Wiener remarked, that had been studied from different sides, each bestowing its own name to the field, each ignorant of what others had discovered, thus creating work that was “triplicated or quadruplicated” because of mutual ignorance or incomprehension. Wiener, no respecter of “narrow domestic walls” would inhabit such “boundary regions” between mathematics, engineering, biology, and sociology, and create cybernetics, a science devoted to the study of feedback systems common to living organisms, machines, and social systems. Here was a science that straddled the no-man’s land between the traditionally separate domains of the natural and the artificial. Wiener’s invention of cybernetics after the end of World War II was a marker of a certain spirit of the times when, in the manner in which Wiener expressed his yearning, scientists began to create serious links between nature and artifact. It is inevitable that this no-man’s land between the natural and the artificial should be part of this story.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound probes how interfaces have acted as a defining threshold between reader/writer and writing itself across several key techno-literary ...
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Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound probes how interfaces have acted as a defining threshold between reader/writer and writing itself across several key techno-literary contexts. My book describes, largely through original archival research, ruptures in present and past media environments that expose how certain literary engagements with screen- and print-based technologies transform reading/writing practices. My book, then, is a crucial contribution to the fields of media studies/digital humanities and poetry/poetics in its development of a media poetics which frames literary production as ineluctably involved in a critical engagement with the limits and possibilities of writing media. Throughout, I demonstrate how a certain thread of experimental poetry has always been engaged with questioning the media by which it is made and through which it is consumed. At each point in this non-linear history, I describe how this lineage of poetry undermines the prevailing philosophies of particular media ecology and so reveals to us, in our present moment, the creative limits and possibilities built into our contemporary technologies. By the time I return once again to the present moment in the post-script via the foregoing four techno-literary ruptures, I have made visible a longstanding conflict between those who would deny us access to fundamental tools of creative production and those who work to undermine these foreclosures on creativity. In many ways, then, my book reveals the strong political engagement driving a tradition of experimental poetry and argues for poetry’s importance in the digital age.Less
Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound probes how interfaces have acted as a defining threshold between reader/writer and writing itself across several key techno-literary contexts. My book describes, largely through original archival research, ruptures in present and past media environments that expose how certain literary engagements with screen- and print-based technologies transform reading/writing practices. My book, then, is a crucial contribution to the fields of media studies/digital humanities and poetry/poetics in its development of a media poetics which frames literary production as ineluctably involved in a critical engagement with the limits and possibilities of writing media. Throughout, I demonstrate how a certain thread of experimental poetry has always been engaged with questioning the media by which it is made and through which it is consumed. At each point in this non-linear history, I describe how this lineage of poetry undermines the prevailing philosophies of particular media ecology and so reveals to us, in our present moment, the creative limits and possibilities built into our contemporary technologies. By the time I return once again to the present moment in the post-script via the foregoing four techno-literary ruptures, I have made visible a longstanding conflict between those who would deny us access to fundamental tools of creative production and those who work to undermine these foreclosures on creativity. In many ways, then, my book reveals the strong political engagement driving a tradition of experimental poetry and argues for poetry’s importance in the digital age.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter four looks at Emily Dickinson’s use of the fascicle as a way to challenge the coherence of the book in the mid to late 19th century.
Chapter four looks at Emily Dickinson’s use of the fascicle as a way to challenge the coherence of the book in the mid to late 19th century.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In the postscript, “The Googlization of Literature,” I focus on the interface of the search engine, particularly Google’s, to describe a collection of literary contributions to contemporary media ...
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In the postscript, “The Googlization of Literature,” I focus on the interface of the search engine, particularly Google’s, to describe a collection of literary contributions to contemporary media studies: works of “readingwriting” that explore a 21st century media poetics as they question how search engines answer our questions, how they read our writing, and even how they write for us.Less
In the postscript, “The Googlization of Literature,” I focus on the interface of the search engine, particularly Google’s, to describe a collection of literary contributions to contemporary media studies: works of “readingwriting” that explore a 21st century media poetics as they question how search engines answer our questions, how they read our writing, and even how they write for us.
Lori Emerson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691258
- eISBN:
- 9781452949482
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691258.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter three focuses on poetic experiments with the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s.
Chapter three focuses on poetic experiments with the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s.
