Courses:

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Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. ISBN: 9780262730099.

Edwards, Paul. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780262550284.

Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London: Routledge, 1998. ISBN: 9780415129633.

Ceruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780262532037.

Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780520208001.

Eglash, Ronald. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780813526133.

Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: iBooks, 2002. ISBN: 9780743444965.

Assigned Readings

Table for Readings

LEC #	TOPICS	ReADINGS
1	Introduction
2	Medieval and Renaissance Cosmology and Clockwork	Gardner, Martin. "The Ars Magna of Ramon Lull." In Logic Machines, Diagrams and Boolean Algebra. New York: Dover Publications, 1968. pp. 1-27. ISBN: 000672054. Channell, David. "The Mechanical World View: The Clockwork Universe, and Mechanical Organisms: From Automata to Clockwork Humans." In The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. pp. 11-36, 40-45, and 117-119. ISBN: 9780195060409. Descartes, René. Discourses 1, 2, 4, and 5. Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637). Translated from the French by F. E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. pp. 27-44, and 53-76. Pascal, Blaise. "The Wager." Pensées (~1660). Translated with an Introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966. pp. 149-155. ISBN: 9780140441710. Swift, Jonathan. "A Voyage to Laputa." Chapter 5 in Gulliver's Travels (1726). Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2001. pp. 223- 231. ISBN: 9780140437348. Film Excerpts Pi
3	The Industrial Revolution and Calculating Engines: Analytics of Capital and Gender Difference in the Work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace	Babbage, Charles. "Difference Engine No. 1 and of the Analytical Engine." From Passages from the Life of a Philosopher. 1864. In On the Principles and Development of the Calculator and Other Seminal Writings by Charles Babbage and Others. Edited by Philip Morrison, and Emily Morrison. New York: Dover Publications, 1984. pp. 33-72. ISBN: 9780486246918. Schaffer, Simon. "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System." Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 203-227. Plant, Sadie. Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1997. pp. 5-32. ISBN: 9780385482608. Augusta, Ada. "Countess of Lovelace." Notes by the Translator on L. F. Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage. 1842. In Charles Babbage: On the Principles and Development of the Calculator and Other Seminal Writings by Charles Babbage and Others. Edited by Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison. New York: Dover Publications, 1984. pp. 245-252, and 284. ISBN: 9780486246918. Film Excerpts Conceiving Ada
4	World War Two: Cybernetics, Communication, and Control	Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly 176, no. 1 (1945): 101-108. Wiener, Norbert. Chapters Introduction, I, V, and VIII in  Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. pp. 1-44, 116-132, and 155-165. ISBN: 9780262730099. Hayles, N. Katherine. "Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety." In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. pp. 84-112. ISBN: 9780226321462.
5	The Cold War: Coding and Closing the World	Edwards, Paul. Chapters 1-2, 4-5, and 8-9 in The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. pp. 1-73, 113-173, and 239-301. ISBN: 9780262550284. Film Excerpts Dr. Strangelove
6	Artificial Intelligence and the Construction of Cognition and Gender	Turing, Alan. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433-460. Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. London: Routledge, 1998. pp. 34-68. ISBN: 9780415129633. Forsythe, Diana E. "Engineering Knowledge: The Construction of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence." In Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. pp. 35-58. ISBN: 9780804742030. Halberstam, Judith. "Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine." Feminist Studies 17, no. 3 (1991): 439-460.
7	Artificial Life	Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780520208001.
8	Postcolonial Recalculations: Legacies of African Mathematical Systems	Eglash, Ronald. African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780813526133.
9	Computing Counterculture: Hacking and Gaming from PC to Internet	Pfaffenberger, Bryan. "The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution." Anthropological Quarterly 61, no. 1 (1988): 39-47. Ross, Andrew. "Hacking Away at the Counterculture." In Technoculture. Edited by Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. pp. 107-134. ISBN: 9780816619320. Taylor, Paul A. "Hacking Culture." In Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 1999. pp. 23-42. ISBN: 9780415180726. Ito, Mizuko. "Virtuality Embodied: The Reality of Fantasy in a Multi-User Dungeon." In Internet Culture. Edited by David Porter. New York: Routledge, 1997. pp. 87-109. ISBN: 9780415916844. Flanagan, Mary. "Hyperbodies, Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk, and Strategies of Resistance." In Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. Edited by Mary Flanagan, and Austin Booth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. pp. 425-454. ISBN: 9780262561501. Schleiner, Anne-Marie. Parasitic Interventions: Game Patches and Hacker Art. 1999. Film Excerpts War Games
10	Properties of Identity and Collectivity in Cyberspace: Gender, Race, Nation, Opensource Guest Lecturer: Anita Chan	Dibbell, Julian. A Rape in Cyberspace (Or TINYSOCIETY, and How to Make One). Chapter 1 in My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999. ISBN: 9780805036268. Turkle, Sherry. "TinySex and Gender Trouble." In Life on the Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. pp. 210-232. ISBN: 9780684833484. Burkhalter, Byron. "Reading Race Online: Discovering Racial Identity in Usenet Discussions." In Communities in Cyberspace . Edited by Mark A. Smith, and Peter Kollock. London: Routledge, 1999. pp. 60-75. ISBN: 9780415191401. Nakamura, Lisa. "Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction." In Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. pp. 1-30. ISBN: 9780415938372. Bray-Crawford, Kekula. "The Ho'okele Netwarriors in the Liquid Continent." In Women@Internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace. Edited by Wendy Harcourt. London: Zed Books, 1999. pp. 162-172. ISBN: 9781856495721. Sundaram, Ravi. "Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India." In The Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. (PDF) Kelty, Chris. "Punt to Culture." Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004): 547-558. Chan, Anita. "Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru." Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2003): 531-545.
11	The Materiality of Networking	Abbate, Janet. "Introduction and White Heat and Cold War: The Origins and Meanings of Packet Switching." In Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. pp. 1-41. ISBN: 9780262011723. Edwards, Paul. "Y2K: Millennial Reflections on Computers as Infrastructure." History & Technology 15 (1998): 7-29. (PDF) Stephenson, Neal. "Mother Earth Mother Board: The Hacker Tourist Ventures Forth across the Wide and Wondrous Meatspace of Three Continents, Chronicling the Laying of the Longest Wire on Earth." WIRED 4, no. 12 (1996): 97-160. Mitchell, William J. "Boundaries/Networks." In Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. pp. 7-17. ISBN: 9780262134347. Kumar, Amitava. "Temporary Access: The Indian H-1B Worker in the United States." In Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. Edited by Alondra Nelson, and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines. New York: NYU Press, 2001. pp. 76-87. ISBN: 9780814736036. Helmreich, Stefan. "Artificial Life, Inc.: Darwin and Commodity Fetishism from Santa Fe to Silicon Valley." Science as Culture 10, no. 4 (2001): 483-504.
12	DNA Computing	Thacker, Eugene. "Biocomputing: Is the Genome a Computer?" In Biomedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. pp. 87-114. ISBN: 9780816643530. Bear, Greg. Blood Music. New York: iBooks, 2002. ISBN: 9780743444965.