ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Ephemeral Literacies: Proliferating and Vanishing Forms of Practical Expertise in the Digital Age

• In Event: CTRL ALT SHIFT. Expériences, Knowledge, Activism, Methods - 1

English Abstract

The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise to ubiquity of digital computers in virtually all areas of science. What from a distance might appear to be a linear story of diffusion and growing dominance is, close up, one of multifaceted forms of expertise coming into being only to be supplanted in a matter of years. The production of purportedly universal knowledge has in practice become tied up with intimate knowledge of extraordinarily complex systems that do not last. The endless cycle of novelty turning quickly to obsolescence (all too familiar from our own devices) poses serious challenges to historians of science.
This talk will use the case of proliferating, evolving, and dying programming languages to explore what I call the problem of ephemeral literacies. Cultures of computer programming tend to emphasize a kind of literacy that necessarily exists in practice: to know a programming language one must code in it. Coding to get a program running is more than merely writing; the production of usable code generally requires extensive editing and debugging. To learn a programming language is to muddle through the details of building functional programs. How can we, as historians, best approach this exacting form of use-based literacy, and how is an intellectual grasp of an abstract language related to a past culture? For all but a few specialists, it will not be possible to gain serious experience coding in the defunct languages and variants that powered the scientific efforts we might wish to understand. Yet without some understanding of their literacy, we cannot begin to understand what practitioners did and experienced when they sat down to program. Using a sample of early programming languages (IPL, FORTRAN, CPL) and the cultures around them, this talk will consider the opportunities and constraints that define our relationship to the plural and often ephemeral ways of reading and writing that have driven past knowledge-making projects.

Author

• David Dunning, National Museum of American History