Summer reading for historians of computing -- suggestions needed.
Please consider helping the community sharpen its engagement with new ideas. Back in graduate school I read feverishly in labor history, business history, history of technology social history, organizational sociology, etc in preparation for my oral examinations. My classes covered still more eclectic topics, ranging from a "greatest hits" of literary theory to nonparametric methods. Over the ten years since I physically left Penn I've been focused on an ever more specialized set of literatures, primarily the burgeoning history of computing field, which I know in ever more depth. In general I've also been doing more writing and less reading. This is probably pretty typical of the intellectual career of a tenured academic, though as I don't have an opportunity to teach any courses related to my interests it may be a little more extreme.
Last summer I finally read Latour's Science in Action properly for the first time (lying outside a dacha on the outskirts of Kiev) and enjoyed it rather more than I'd expected. That hardly puts me on the cutting edge of intellectual fashion, but it did remind me of the pleasure of reading a really nicely constructed and provocative book of general interest.
So, putting these two thoughts together I wondered what top grade new work might have appeared over the past ten years. I'm thinking of books of implicit rather than explicit relevance to the history of computing, either offering new intellectual perspectives or just serving as models of craft. Scholarly books that could be read for pleasure rather than duty. I'm sure suggestions would be of general interest to the SIGCIS community, as it heads to the beaches, lakes, mountains and dachas of the world.
Please propose your suggestions as comments below, including the book and a short description of why it deserve to be read widely by historians of computing.
- thaigh's blog
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