Featured Project
Pioneers in the in the development of the
ALGOL programming language. (clockwise
from top left) Heinz Rutishauser,
Peter Naur, Friedrich L. Bauer,
Adriaan van Wijngaarden
A group of historians have won a highly competitive award
from the European Union to carry out a project on the history
of software in Europe. The project involves researchers from
the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Finland, Belgium, France,
England, Greece, Germany, and the United States. The following
description is taken directly from the successful project proposal.
Software for Europe: Constructing Europe through
Software
Software - the instructions allowing computers to be used -
has played a significant and under-explored role in the shaping
of post-war Europe. We propose to address this role through the
tensions between two contrasting modes of computer technology
appropriation: the direct importation of applications software,
as promoted by the practices of corporations such as IBM; and
the development of software through university-industry co-entrepreneurship,
demonstrated in the case of the programming language ALGOL.
Writing a contextual history of software allows us to address
historical themes concerning Europe and Europeanness in the second
half of the twentieth century. In the initial era of post-war
reconstruction, with declinist rhetoric setting in across much
of Europe, building a computing machine could be seen as a source
of specifically national pride; a decade later, the shift from
hardware to software initiatives appeared to present a very different,
universalist and internationalist character. What informed this
change? Underlying software standards, meanwhile, promoted a
largely hidden mode of integration: what was its role in the
move towards European unification and the Cold War?
As a collaborative research project, building on growing cooperation
in European history of computing, Software for Europe aims to
answer these questions.
Methodology
Software for Europe is a historical project with strong interdisciplinary
connections. Its members are informed variously by the disciplinary
perspectives of cultural history, business history, economic
history, history of science and technology, science and technology
studies, and technology policy; it is our intention that the
project’s work will be recognised in all these fields.
Much of the work will proceed from analysis of written sources,
published and archival, and to some extent on the examination
of software itself (a practice not yet widely developed, to
which the project is expected to contribute some methodological
innovation.) Evidence will also be drawn from interviews with
policymakers and representative users from the relevant industrial,
academic, political and administrative constituencies. As this
is a key element of our project, and the production of web-accessible
oral history transcripts is one of our stated deliverables,
we plan to devote a summer school in 2008 to this area. The
work of Software for Europe will be carried out primarily through
a mixture of four-year PhD and three-year postdoctoral projects.
Local coordination will be kept on track through six-monthly
meetings of the whole group, at which members will present
interim results, share insights and plan the co-authoring of
publications.
Deliverables
The project offers a coherent set of studies framed by the tension
between the two modes of appropriation. Building on established
cooperations between several of the partners in recent years,
we will ensure the coherence of the collaboration and stimulate
the circulation of ideas through a pre-planned series of winter
workshops and summer schools, to be hosted by each of the participants
in turn.
These workshops will also be directed towards the publications
of three major collaborative works, conceived as books or special
numbers of leading journals in the history of computing or technology:
- Using IBM: constructing European and national know-how and
identities in Europe;
- Co-entrepreneurship of university and industry: compiling
ALGOL;
- Software shaping Europe.
We will also institute a publicly-accessible Software for Europe
website, maintained jointly by participants, to publicise the
nature and findings of our work and to make available resources
including interview transcripts.
Lead investigator: Gerard Alberts, University
of Amsterdam - G.Alberts@uva.nl
[Other
Featured Projects]
|
