Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society (Studies in Computing and Culture)

I strongly recommend this excellent, engaging book. The abstractions and embodiments framing, the range of captivating and important themes, the geographical coverage and diversity, and the deep insights of the editors and chapter authors all make this richly thoughtful and highly compelling scholarship. It will be a very influential book for many years to come.

Every so often, an edited collection announces a paradigm shift. This is one of those books. As it shows, the history of computing has become much more than the study of digital devices. It has become the study of a deep and ongoing transformation in the architecture of our social lives.

Drawing together an extraordinary group of scholars, this volume contains individual chapters that challenge us to rethink what we thought we knew about specific currents in the history of computing and society. As a whole, the text inspires a vital reimagining of the relationship between abstraction and embodiment, which is sure to make it required reading for years to come.

I keep returning to one of the book's central questions: in computer history, who has a mind and who has a body? By bringing together themes of abstraction and embodiment, this evocative book helps us see computer history, and its study, in exciting new ways.

This insightful collection offers new ways to understand computing by challenging the core oppositions that dominate our stories about them: abstractions vs. embodiments, machines vs. humans, software vs. hardware. Bringing together essays by established scholars and young researchers who are changing the field of the history of computing, this collection shows how each side shapes and reshapes the other.

Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick offer us a dazzling curated take on computation. These essays pull the putatively universal, abstracted machine, one floating above the human, down to the earthy of specific, materialized objects entangled with our embodied, gendered, racialized, working bodies. The authors of this volume make computers a thousand times more interesting by showing them to be part of our everyday; it is a social history of computing tied to the real-world fabric of our lives. Our one and zero machines won't look the same to anyone who plunges with this book into computers as they are in our politicking, speculating, theorizing, weaponizing, coercing, extracting, surveilling, hacking, and medicalizing world.

I strongly recommend this excellent, engaging book. The abstractions and embodiments framing, the range of captivating and important themes, the geographical coverage and diversity, and the deep insights of the editors and chapter authors all make this richly thoughtful and highly compelling scholarship. It will be a very influential book for many years to come.