Briefly, a group of 19th century American historians, journalists, and census chiefs used statistics, historical atlases, and the machinery of the census bureau to publicly argue for the disintegration of the U.S. Western Frontier in the late 19th century.These moves were, in part, made to consolidate power in the American West and wrestle control from the native populations who still lived there. They accomplished this, in part, by publishing popular atlases showing that the western frontier was so fractured that it was difficult to maintain and defend.The argument, it turns out, was pretty compelling.Part of what drove the statistical power and scientific legitimacy of these arguments was the new method, in 1890, of entering census data on punched cards and processing them in tabulating machines. The mechanism itself was wildly successful, and the inventor’s company wound up merging with a few others to become IBM. As was true of punched-card humanities projects through the time of Father Roberto Busa, this work was largely driven by women.It’s worth pausing to remember that the history of punch card computing is also a history of the consolidation of government power. Seeing like a computer was, for decades, seeing like a state. And how we see influences what we see, what we care about, how we think.
It is my crude impression that, while WWII and the use of computers for military purposes (code breaking, calculating artillery tables, simulating atomic explosions) figure prominently in a wide-spread narrative about the origins of computing, punchcard tabulation is not so widely recognized, and yet it was earlier by half a century and very important.
H/t Alan Liu:
"Ours is a digital history steeped in the the values of the cultural turn..." https://t.co/QrV9nNU0LC— Alan Liu (@alanyliu) October 30, 2016
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