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21A.350J / SP.484J / STS.086J The Anthropology of Computing, Fall 2004


This course examines computers anthropologically, as meaningful tools revealing the social and cultural orders that produce them. We read classic texts in computer science along with works analyzing links between machines and culture. We explore early computation theory and capitalist manufacturing; cybernetics and WWII operations research; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; the creation and commodification of the personal computer; the hacking aesthetic; non-Western histories of computing; the growth of the Internet as a military, academic, and commercial project; the politics of identity in cyberspace; and the emergence of "evolutionary" computation.
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Download this Course


21A-350JFall-2004.zip

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Lecture Notes


Notes for many of the lecture sessions are available in the table below.

LEc # TOPICS
1 Introduction
2 Medieval and Renaissance Cosmology and Clockwork (PDF)
3 The Industrial Revolution and Calculating Engines: Analytics of Capital and Gender Difference in the Work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (PDF)
4 World War Two: Cybernetics, Communication, and Control (PDF)
5 The Cold War: Coding and Closing the World (PDF)
6 Artificial Intelligence and the Construction of Cognition and Gender (PDF)
7 Artificial Life
8 Postcolonial Recalculations: Legacies of African Mathematical Systems
9 Computing Counterculture: Hacking and Gaming from PC to Internet (PDF)
10
Properties of Identity and Collectivity in Cyberspace: Gender, Race, Nation, Opensource

Guest Lecturer: Anita Chan
11 The Materiality of Networking
12 DNA Computing (PDF)
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Readings