Science at Collins

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women in  technology. Bloggers take a pledge to highlight an influential woman in technology in order to inspire today’s women in technology, and so, today, I’d like to do that.

However, I don’t want to highlight just one woman—I’d like to highlight all of the women who served as human computers over the years.

Most of them labored quietly at math and computing, in fields ranging from astronomy to cryptography, at institutions from Harvard to the WPA, and few of them are identified as having made any individual breakthroughs or are widely remembered by the public. They were regarded as a respectable workers, though rarely as visionaries.

The image of this mass of women whose role in technology was quietly accepted makes me hope that soon we can reach a point where, in a more equal context and with more elbow room for their visions, it is again taken as simply natural for women to work in technology and computing. As someone who’s not planning on shaking any paradigms, but hopes to master the necessary technology to do her work well in an increasingly digital and coded world, I find these women inspiring examples to remember when the world of software and technology looks forbidding for whatever reason.

And since even those who do plan to shake up paradigms and start computing revolutions need to start out somewhere, I hope this image makes the entry a little more welcoming for them.

To learn more about human computers or women in computer science, try:

• Get to Collins Library resources and learn more about current women in science and women in computing.
• Check out Alan Grier’s When Computers Were Human (QA 303.2 .G75 2005 at Collins Library)
  • Since this is such an interdisciplinary topic, mining the bibliography will get you to more related sources faster than a search might.
• Try David Skinner, “The Age of Female Computers,” The New Atlantis, Number 12, Spring 2006, pp. 96-103.
• Or for a taste of period literature, scope out the 1944 “Careers for Girls” in the Mathematical Gazette.