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Schedule

Introductions

Mon, Jan 27

Introductions

Readings

  • (In class): Plato, Phaedrus, on the invention of writing.

Early Modern Information Overload

Wed, Jan 29

Learning how to Read

Readings

Mon, Feb 03

Shuffling Paper

Readings

  • Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier “Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43, no. 1 (March 2012): 4–15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.10.021.

Wed, Feb 05

Ordering the Worlds

Readings

  • Jorge Luis Borges “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” trans. Lilia Graciela Vázquez (Alamut, 1999).
  • Michel Foucault The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)., Introduction and Chapter 3

Preparation

  • What do you understand about the Foucault?

Mon, Feb 10

Visualization and Images

Readings

In class

  • William Playfair 1759-1823. The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, ed. Howard Wainer and Ian Spence 1944- (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Assignment Distributed: First self assessment

Wed, Feb 12

Sharing Knowledge in Early Modern China

Readings

  • Schäfer, Dagmar. “Silken Strands: Making Technology Work in China.” In Culture of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 45–73.
  • Carla Nappi, “INTERLUDE. A READER’S GUIDE TO THE BENCAO GANGMU.” from The Monkey and the Inkpot.

Mon, Feb 17

No class: President’s Day

Information Managers

Wed, Feb 19

Accounting for Slavery

Readings

  • Ellen Gruber Garvey and Lisa Gitelman “‘Facts and FACTS’ : Abolitionists’ Database Innovations,” in "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 89–102.
  • Sean Wilentz Major Problems in the Early Republic, 1787-1848: Documents and Essays (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1992)., “GW Hammond, Instructions to his Overseer”
  • Jessica Marie Johnson “Markup BodiesBlack [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36, no. 4 (137) (December 1, 2018): 57–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658.
  • (In class: In class: American Slavery as it is, runaway advertisements.)

Mon, Feb 24

Industrial Revolutions

Readings

Wed, Feb 26

Archives

activity: New York Public Library, archival document session.

Mon, Mar 02

State Capacity

Readings

  • James C. Scott Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)., pp. 11-52, 64-83. (i.e.; Chapter 1, and the last half of chapter 2). On Google Drive, and available online from campus at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctt1nq3vk.

note: The Scott is full of some really Big Ideas that we need for the rest of this class, told through several amazingly divergent stories about particular areas (Germany forestry, French land taxes, Filipino surnames, Parisian Streets, and so forth.) Some of these–especially the idea of “legibility”–do not show up until the very end of these selections. The details are fascinating and help you understand the issues; but the specifics here are less important than in, say, Beniger. Do not lose sight of the forestry for the trees.

Wed, Mar 04

CLASS CANCELLED, instructor illness.

Mon, Mar 09

The Census

Readings

  • Thomas P. Kinnahan “Charting Progress: Francis Amasa Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the United States and Narratives of Western Expansion,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 399–423, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0012.
  • Margo J Anderson The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)., chapter on industrial census.
  • Bring the Scott readings as well.

Cultures of Data/BEGINNING OF CORONAVIRUS REMOTE INSTRUCTION.

Wed, Mar 11

Fordism

Readings

  • Stephen Meyer The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921, Suny Series in American Social History (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1981).

in_class: chaplin_modern_1936, first fifteen minutes

Mon, Mar 16

No class: Spring Break

Wed, Mar 18

No class: Spring Break

Mon, Mar 23

Ordinary Americans

activity: Please post online onto NYU courses an image of something interesting/unexpected from your archival dataset. We will talk about these in small groups on Zoom for the first 45 minutes. Then we will talk about the Igo readings about Middletown for about 45 minutes.

Readings

  • Sarah Elizabeth Igo The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007)., Introduction, Chapter 1 and 2. Note that all six chapters of the Igo are online in the Google docs to accomodate anyone who cannot access the online versions through the NYU library. But I would prefer you access directly through the NYU library, where you can read/download the full book with NYU login.. Please be in touch if you have trouble with network issues, etc.

Wed, Mar 25

Quantifying Publics

activity: In class presentations

Readings

  • Igo, Chapters 3-4 and epilogue.

Mon, Mar 30

State statistics

Reading

  • Ghosh, Arunabh. 2018. “Lies, Damned Lies, and (Bourgeois) Statistics: Ascertaining Social Fact in Mid-century China and the Soviet Union.” Osiris 33 (1): 149-168

Computing Culture

Wed, Apr 01

Imagining Computers

Readings

Mon, Apr 06

Making Programmers

Readings

  • “The Computer Girls”, Cosmopolitan, 1967
  • Jennifer Light “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455.
  • Desk Set (20th Century Fox, 1957)., in class

Wed, Apr 08

Data-Mania

Readings

Mon, Apr 13

Punching in

Readings

  • Stephen Lubar, “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” 1992. link
  • More time on Miller and privacy.

Personal Computing

Wed, Apr 15

Database Populism

Readings

  • Database Populism
  • Ted M. Lau, “Total Kitchen Information System”, Byte Magazine, 1977

Mon, Apr 20

The Spreadsheet

Readings

  • Stephen Levy, “A Spreadsheet way of knowing”, Harper’s Magazine, 1984. (You can find a newer copy of this republished online, but read the PDF of the original.

Wed, Apr 22

Surveillance Statism

Readings

Mon, Apr 27

The Information Superhighway

Readings

  • Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999)., Introduction; Chapters 1, 2, and 3

Social Computing

Wed, Apr 29

Information Overload Revisited

Readings

  • James Gleick The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011).
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)., Chapter 2

Mon, May 04

Big Data and the Sciences

Readings

  • The End of Theory, Wired Magazine, 2008 link
  • The Norvig-Chomsky Debate, 2012: Norvig and Chomsky

Wed, May 06

Coronadata

Readings

Mon, May 11

Surveillance Capitalism

Readings

  • Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, excerpts.

2020-05-15

Assignment: Final Papers due over NYU classes by 5pm. I will respond to any requests for comments on draft first paragraphs sent by 4pm, Tuesday.

Anderson, Margo J. The American Census: A Social History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Beniger, James R. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

Blair, Ann. “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload Ca.1550-1700.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11–28. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2003.0014.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Translated by Lilia Graciela Vázquez. Alamut, 1999.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, July 1945. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/.

———. “Memex Revisited.” In From Memex to Hypertext, edited by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, 197–216. San Diego, CA, USA: Academic Press Professional, Inc., 1991. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=132180.132193.

Desk Set. 20th Century Fox, 1957.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Garvey, Ellen Gruber, and Lisa Gitelman. “‘Facts and FACTS’ : Abolitionists’ Database Innovations.” In "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron, 89–102. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

Igo, Sarah Elizabeth. The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.

J., D. O. “Mercantile Agencies.” New York Daily Times. November 7, 1851. http://search.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimesindex/docview/95765241/abstract/142445A46F336CD6D70/11?accountid=12826.

Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup BodiesBlack [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36, no. 4 (137) (December 1, 2018): 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658.

Kinnahan, Thomas P. “Charting Progress: Francis Amasa Walker’s Statistical Atlas of the United States and Narratives of Western Expansion.” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 399–423. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0012.

Light, Jennifer. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455.

Meyer, Stephen. The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921. Suny Series in American Social History. Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1981.

Miller, Arthur Raphael. The Assault on Privacy: Computers, Data Banks, and Dossiers. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1971. http://archive.org/details/assaultonprivacy00mill.

Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Isabelle Charmantier. “Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43, no. 1 (March 2012): 4–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2011.10.021.

Playfair, William, 1759-1823. The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary. Edited by Howard Wainer and Ian Spence 1944-. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Priestley, Joseph. A Description of a Chart of Biography: By Joseph Priestley. ... Printed at Warrington, 1764. http://archive.org/details/adescriptionach00priegoog.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Wilentz, Sean. Major Problems in the Early Republic, 1787-1848: Documents and Essays. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1992.