Class Materials:

Required Reading/Viewing/Listening/Doing

Heide, L. (2009). Punched-card systems and the early information explosion, 1880–1945. JHU Press.

Essinger, J. (2014). Ada's algorithm: How Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace launched the digital age. Melville House. (Ch. 12-14)

Whitaker, M. (2024) Origin stories: Plantations, Computers and Industrial Control. Logic.

Mechanical Marvels – BBC

Henty, G.A. (1880) Through the Fray: a tale of the Luddite Riots

Tech Won’t Save Us – interview with Brian Merchant about the Luddite Rebellion

Slide Rule Tutorial

Further Reading:

Siddique, A. K. (2024). The archive of empire: knowledge, conquest, and the making of the early modern British world. Yale University Press.

Bouk, D. (2019). How our days became numbered: Risk and the rise of the statistical individual. University of Chicago Press.

Bouk, Dan. Democracy's data: The hidden stories in the US Census and how to read them. MCD, 2022.

Hacking, I. (1990). The taming of chance (No. 17). Cambridge University Press.

Murphy, M. (2017). The economization of life. Duke University Press.

Bedini, S. A. (1964). The role of automata in the history of technology. Technology and Culture, 5(1), 24-42.

Day, R. E. (2014). Indexing it all: The subject in the age of documentation, information, and data. Mit Press.

Sekula, A. (2020). The body and the archive. In The Body (pp. 163-166). Routledge.

Hobsbawm, E. J. (2022). The Human Results of the Industrial Revolution: 1750–1850. In Man in Adaptation (pp. 528-538). Routledge.

Jones, M. L. (2019). Reckoning with matter: Calculating machines, innovation, and thinking about thinking from Pascal to Babbage. University of Chicago Press.

Owen, R. (1996). The population census of 1917 and its relationship to Egypt's three 19th century statistical regimes. Journal of Historical Sociology, 9(4), 457-472.

Grier, D.A. (2007) When computers were human. Princeton UP.

Yates, J. (1993). Control through communication: The rise of system in American management (Vol. 6). JHU Press.

Yates, J., & Murphy, C. N. (2019). Engineering rules: Global standard setting since 1880. JHU Press.