Research Projects

Black History Month and the History of Computing

February 23, 2022     #research

In celebration of Black History Month, I have been reflecting on what my scholarship might have to say about the history of African American computer programmers. On the website on the history of computer programming that developed out of my... <more>

NSF Grant - The Future Matrix of Care

August 21, 2019     #research

I am very pleased to be one of the co-PIs on the recently awarded NSF Grant 1928547, FW-HTF-P: The Future Matrix of Care: Communities, Networks, and Technologies. This planning grant proposal is part of the NSF Future of Work Initiative,... <more>

The Future of Artificial Intelligence

November 29, 2018     #media #research

At the end of November the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University hosted a two-day event gathering historians and practioners from around the world. I was pleased to be invited to participate in the opening plenary... <more>

Contextualizing the Google Manifesto

August 12, 2017     #media #research

“We’re just starting to acknowledge the work that these women did — but that’s a fault of our history, not a function of their lack of presence. They were invisible, but they weren’t absent.”1

... <more>

The Art of Software Maintenance

April 05, 2016     #research #media

It often surprises my students when I tell them that as much as 60-80% of all software development effort (time and money) goes into software maintenance. After all, software is not a technology that we think of as “breaking down”... <more>

The Cult of Masculinity in Computing

October 14, 2014     #research

Update: I titled my first book after its central characters, adopting a contemporary term for these new specialists — “the computer boys” — that for me neatly captured mixed sense of awe, mystery, suspicion, and derision with... <more>

Computer Security and the Sociology of Risk

March 21, 2014     #research

At the heart of the discipline of computer security is the problem of risk: how to analyze and quantify risks that are for the most part invisible, intangible, and not immediately life-threatening; how to communicate risk to computer users, software... <more>