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This chapter examines the emergence of Debian, a community software project, from 1997 to 2002, showing how select, skilled programmers emerged as the custodians who guided Debian in the context of its highly distributed and pluralistic structure. These stewards functioned in a somewhat comparable fashion to the open elite in biotechnology, ushering in promising newcomers, policing free riders, and maintaining the norms of the community. In such a manner, this small community of gatekeepers helped mobilize resources and commitment to a model of governance that resembled the invisible college of biotech science described in chapter 13. Through the development of key signing practices, a membership process was monitored by a small number of gatekeepers who maintained the openness of the system.

This chapter provides an overview of film programming, as well as the terminology to be employed throughout the rest of this book. The central activity in the domain of film exhibition is known as ‘programming films’, or ‘curating films’. In light of this, all of the various film programmers worldwide are to be considered as ‘custodians of cinema culture’. This means that their screenings should offer a varied supply of worthwhile film productions, by presenting a diverse selection of the most recent releases, and simultaneously keeping the varied and complex past of cinema alive through screenings of all sorts of film heritage. It is also important to see things from the perspective of the film viewer in order to improve the decisions of the film curator about the choice and the order of films in the programme. This book offers an exploration of essential issues concerning the phenomenon of selecting films and presenting them on a big screen, to a paying audience, whether at a film theatre, film festival, or film archive.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the history of computer software and the intersection between the history of software and the larger social history of the computer revolution of the mid- to late twentieth century. The focus of this volume is on computer programmers, consultants, analysts, operators and other technical specialists who build software, and the ways in which these specialists constructed for themselves a unique occupational identity based on their control over the nascent technology of electronic computing. This volume traces the history of the so-called “computer boys” as they struggled to establish a role for themselves within traditional organizational, professional, and academic hierarchies.

This chapter traces the history of computer programming from its origins as low-status clerical work, often performed by women, into one of the highest-paid technical occupations of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It explores the emergence of the computer programmer as a well-compensated technical expert and explains while they continued to struggle with questions of status and identity, they were generally considered to be anything but routine clerical workers by the end of the 1950s. It also highlights widespread perception that programming was a black art during 1950s and 1960s.

This chapter focuses on early attempts to use aptitude tests and personality profiles to manage the growing “crisis” of computer programmer training and recruitment. It discusses the highlights of Training Personnel for the Computing Machine Field and highlights the lack of available trained computer programmers in the mid-1960s. It describes System Development Corporation's experience on the use of aptitude tests and personality profiles in the training and recruitment of programmers and explains the impact of these tests on the masculinization of the profession.

This chapter examines the history of the emergence of software engineering during the period from 1968 to 1972. It explains that the term software engineering was first used by hardware engineer J. Presper Eckert in reference to the growing conflict between computer programmers and their corporate employers. It discusses the highlights of the first-ever North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Conference on Software Engineering intended to address the impending crisis in software production.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the computer revolution and the emergence of computer programmers. It highlights the continued existence of a seemingly perpetual crisis in what is generally considered to be one of the most successful and profitable industries of all time and the persistence of the rhetoric of crisis in an industry characterized by rapid change and innovation. It also considers the concept of adaptive maintenance which captures neatly what has been referred to throughout recent history as the heterogeneous nature of software.

This chapter defines the fundamental concepts that are explored throughout the book. The term ‘film’ refers to the phenomenon of a public screening of a film for a paying audience in a film theatre, at a film festival, in a film archive, or elsewhere. A ‘film theatre’ is a venue for film screening through the year, while a ‘film festival’ is a temporary series of film screenings and side programmes presented as a unified event. On the other hand, a ‘film archive’ is an institution dedicated to conserving, preserving, and restoring film heritage. The term ‘film curator’ is used to indicate the person who compiles a film programme, and the term ‘film programmer’ is frequently used in the international film industry. The curator's goal is to obtain a measure of critical acclaim, and provide the highest possible customer satisfaction.

This chapter focuses on the people behind interactive journalism—hacker journalists, programmer journalists, and data journalists—and how they understand the rise of the subspecialty and its new importance in the field. More specifically, it examines how these interactive journalists behind the work and knowledge of the expansion of professional journalism see themselves and what they bring in terms of unique perspectives and skills as they adopt practices from programming cultures. The chapter discusses the backgrounds and perspectives of hacker journalists, programmer journalists, and data journalists as well as their ways of thinking. It also asks whether hacker journalists can be considered journalists and why they decide to become hacker journalists and suggests that data journalists are not coders. It shows that there are indeed new kinds of journalists who signal by their presence just how journalism is expanding. Finally, it highlights messy delineations and difficulty in defining the many types of skills and specialists within interactive journalism.

This chapter presents evidence that at each level of the thalamocortical hierarchy the strength of our conscious perceptions increases. Conscious processes are not all-or-none effects, they are graded. Four factors may be particularly relevant for understanding the neural production of conscious experiences: (1) the actions of the thalamic gate; (2) the neural activity that anticipates an organism’s actions; (3) the activity of the hierarchy of cortical monitors; and particularly (4) the motor actions produced by the outputs of the cortical monitors and acting on the phylogenetically old parts of the brain: these serve to keep actions in accord with anticipations.

This chapter charts how a group of citizens seek to challenge systemic and institutional racism within their city by building their own datasets and tools. It looks at how some computer programmers created black data — data about the murder of black lives, data about systemic, institutional racism, and data that demands justice. The result is a Mapping Police Violence database. The database maps the deaths of people killed by the police by district, most of which happened in black neighbourhoods. This initiative then grew into a black atlas of the city, incorporating crime data, census data, and some housing and welfare data.