Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (1977)

“For Martin Heidegger broadly, the question of being formed the essence of his philosophical inquiry. In The Question Concerning Technology (Die Frage nach der Technik), Heidegger sustains this inquiry, but turns to the particular phenomenon of technology, seeking to derive the essence of technology and humanity’s role of being with it. Heidegger originally published the text in 1954, in Vorträge und Aufsätze.

The Question Concerning Technology was originally named The Framework and first presented on December 1, 1949, in Bremen. It was at this time presented as the second of four lectures, collectively called ‘Insight into what is’. The other lectures were titled ‘The Thing’, ‘The Danger’, and ‘The Turning’.” (from Wikipedia)

Translated and with an Introduction by William Lovitt
Publisher Garland Publishing, New York & London, 1977
ISBN 0061319694, 9780061319693
182 pages

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PDF (updated on 2013-4-8)

Claire Taylor, Thea Pitman (eds.): Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature (2007)

This highly-innovative volume provides the first sustained academic focus on cyberliterature and cyberculture in Latin America, investigating the ways in which this form of cultural production is providing new configurations of subjects, narrative voices, and even political agency. Despite cyberculture’s spread throughout the Hispanic diaspora, much of the influence of this new discipline on Latin American culture remains undocumented. This timely volume focuses on the inclusivity of this new scholarship and provides extensive geographical coverage of topics as diverse as Chicano border writing and Brazilian and Argentine cybercultural phenomena.

Publisher Liverpool University Press, 2007
ISBN 184631061X, 9781846310614
295 pages

Key terms: Zapatistas, posthuman, virtual communities, Rayuela, cyberspace, weblog, hypermedia, netwar, e-magazines, Cyberliterature, blog, Latin American literature, Mexico City, hypertext fiction, EZLN, Jorge Luis Borges, hacktivism, Latin American Cinema.

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David Alan Grier: When Computers Were Human (2005)

“Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term “computer” referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology.

Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother’s casual remark, “I wish I’d used my calculus,” hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world.

The book begins with the return of Halley’s comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration.

When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.”

Published by Princeton University Press, 2005
ISBN 0691091579, 9780691091570
411 pages

Key terms:
Mathematical Tables Project, Gertrude Blanch, Karl Pearson, Applied Mathematics Panel, Charles Henry Davis, Halley’s comet, Warren Weaver, Oswald Veblen, Wallace Eckert, Ida Rhodes, Benjamin Peirce, Charles Babbage, ENIAC, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Harvard Observatory, Lyman Briggs, John von Neumann, Bell Telephone Laboratories, human computers, Edmund Halley

Publisher

DJVU (updated on 2012-7-25)