Volume 57 Issue 3 (Nov 2022)

Over the course of the past decade, coding has been positioned as a silver-bullet solution for several key issues in the US tech industry. The coding bootcamps that have sprung up in response to the contemporary coding obsession may appear innovative, but they bear a remarkable resemblance to the electronic data programming (EDP) schools that proliferated during the "software crisis" of the 1960s and 1970s. By comparing the current coding craze and coding bootcamps to the software crisis and EDP schools, this article not only draws attention to the remarkable similarities between the two periods and institutional forms but also identifies specific qualities and problematic practices of EDP schools that threaten to repeat themselves with coding bootcamps. It then concludes with some reflections about why certain "forgotten" histories of computing are more relevant now than ever.

This article combines humanistic "data critique" with informed inspection of big data analysis. It measures gender bias when gender prediction software tools (Gender API, Namsor, and Genderize.io) are used in historical big data research. Gender bias is measured by contrasting personally identified computer science authors in the well-regarded DBLP dataset (1950–80) with exactly comparable results from the software tools. Implications for public understanding of gender bias in computing and the nature of the computing profession are outlined. Preliminary assessment of the Semantic Scholar dataset is presented. The conclusion combines humanistic approaches with selective use of big data methods.

Transmitting information as electrical impulses favored such story qualities as brevity, an inverted-pyramid structure, and a muted authorial voice. Historians often ascribe these attributes to the narrow bandwidth of early telegraphy, overlooking decades of innovation that expanded its information-carrying capacity. This article argues that telegraphic story qualities lodged in journalism when the network delivered too much, not too little, information. The news industry discovered that a story's telegraphic qualities contributed to the efficiency of processing texts and suited marketing. Journalists and journalism educators embraced telegraphic style as a reporter's stock-in-trade that distinguished newswriting from other forms of presenting information.