However, I thought that to fulfill my pledge that I need to write about another woman or women in technology this year, and I’ve decided to write about Ory Okolloh and Juliana Rotich. (I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Juliana just a couple of weeks ago for the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast. I wear a necklace. She asked, “Is that pi?” No, it’s ogham, an ancient alphabet. It means oak.” I said. She replied, “When a geek asks you, you should just say it’s pi,” she responded.) 

Ushahidi, which means witness or testimony in Swahili, was born out of the post-election violence in Kenya in early 2008. Ory had been collecting reports of violence at Kenyan Pundit, but she soon found the effort needed something else so she put a call out to fellow bloggers and developers in Kenya.  Erik Hersman, Juliana and David Kobia all answered the call. Over a long weekend, using the Kohana web framework, they had built Ushahidi and were taking in reports via email, a web form and SMS. The platform has since been used to monitor elections in India, Mexico, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Recently, using the excellent Frontline SMS tool, CrowdFlower to help with translation and a distributed, but very focused, volunteer effort, they launched a Ushahidi project to help people in Haiti get the services they needed in the wake of the devastating earthquake. Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, Frontline SMS and other services are now playing a huge role in post-disaster response. When tragedy strikes, crisis camps of developers around the world come together to set up tools that help speed aid to where it’s needed most.

The New York Times recently called Ushahidi, Africa’s gift to Silicon Valley and wrote:

This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information.

Ory and Juliana haven’t just helped launch a tool, they have been instrumental in helping move forward a movement to use techn0logy to improve disaster relief and reporting that began after other earlier disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or the Asian tsunami.

This year, I narrowed it down to two amazing women, and since I couldn’t pick one, I’m gonna write them both up as my heroines! :)

First up, someone I’ve looked up to for a long time, Kate Carruthers. When I first met Kate, I was astounded by her knowledge and willingness to share it. She is a constant source of information and support and always entertaining on Twitter. I remember it was with a lot of trepidation I approached her to she if she’d consider being my mentor last year, and she said yes without any hesitation! *air punch* Her mentorship has been invaluable to me, and I hope to be passing it along when I get a chance to, as Kate has taught me.

My other heroine this year is Pamela Fox. Pamela is deliciously geeky and charmingly girly and I am just in awe of her. I follow her globe-trotting, talk-giving, bot-making adventures on Twitter with interest and one day hope to have a fraction of her skills. She’s inspired me to learn to code, just so I can make cool stuff like she does!

When I grow up, I wanna be just like them!

Thank you ladies for doing what you do, and doing it so brilliantly.

I find I prefer Dreamwidth overall for its community — there’s a wonderful team of people working there [men and women alike] and it’s very much a user-centered environment. But a good portion of the staff is female, and I love admiring them for all that they do!

Most especially I admire these ladies: Denise, Afuna, Aveleh, Kat, Dom, and ChemicalLace.

Note: not all staff has their full names on this list. Most people on this list have been addressed by alias and journal name.

Denise Paolucci (denise): the co-founder and very wonderful advocate of this community! She’s also the business manager/marketer.

Afuna(afuna) and Aveleh(aveleh): Styles support! also Afuna does invite system too. Both of these are very important for a social networking site. Because a site’s only as good as the its users and its pretty AND accessible design.

ChemicalLace (chemicallace), Dom(domtheknight), and Kat (zarhooie): The Support Triumvirate! Well, can’t have a good webteam without the support techs. And I love these guys to pieces they’re fun and geeky and all kinds of helpful in both contributions and instruction.

There’s a ton more people that I love over at Dreamwidth, but these leading ladies get a lot of props from me. I might feature the rest of the team later on in a post over here.

If you wanna learn more about Dreamwidth:
Dreamwidth Studios
Dreamwidth Notes – The Dreamwidth Studios Wiki

If you’d like a code go hop over to: Dreamwidth Code Sharing

And since Dreamwidth’s anniversary is up and coming look out for The Three Weeks for Dreamwidth Project

Ada Lovelace – or, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace – was born in London in 1815. Her father was the poet Lord Byron. She died at the age of 36. And, in between, she was the world’s first computer programmer.

When Charles Babbage built his analytical engine, one of the ways Ada Lovelace got involved was to design a method of getting the machine to output the Bernoulli numbers. It doesn’t matter what those are. What she did was to write the first ever algorithm for a computer. This was in the 1840s.

In her honour, some enterprising bloggers have established March 24th as Ada Lovelace Day, a day on which women’s historically under-appreciated contributions to science are celebrated all across the interwebs. This sounded like something worth doing, and which I thought might get me writing some more, so a few weeks ago I got hold of a copy of a biography of Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin was was born in 1920, and died of ovarian cancer in 1958, and as under-appreciated contributions to science go, hers was a big one.

You know DNA? Well, you’re welcome.

To be less glib: DNA is the molecule that contains the genetic code from which everything that has ever lived (and arguably some things that haven’t) has been built. Here’s a rather nice picture of what it looks like. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for figuring out that this was what it looked like – a double-helix, those two looping spirals joined intermittently across the middle like that. Watson and Crick are the familiar names that everyone knows, and are the standard, simple, schoolbook answer to the basic question “Who discovered the structure of DNA?”

And they were indeed brilliant scientists, working at a prestigious university, at the forefront of one of the most exciting and important areas of biological research. But the whole idea that science is primarily achieved by lone geniuses, working in near isolation and having individual flashes of insight which suddenly and abruptly lead to huge and fantastic paradigm shifts, is – although not a complete myth – certainly a severe oversimplification.

Malcolm Gladwell has explained this general idea better than I could. The example he uses is of Philo T. Farnsworth, and the many other people involved in the invention of television. (Incidentally, the standard, simple, schoolbook answer to the basic question “Who invented television?” in England when I was growing up was always John Logie Baird. He gets a mention only in the final paragraph of Gladwell’s article, described as one of several people “who had tried and failed to produce mechanical television”.)

The point is that, even though the names of Crick and Watson are the ones best remembered today, being the two names on the particular paper in the journal Nature that first described the double-helical structure of DNA, this one paper was obviously built upon a huge body of previously established scientific study, and the two were never working in an academic vacuum. There were a lot of people involved in the study of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s – sixteen names are listed in Wikipedia’s sidebar on “Double Helix Discovery” – all to various degrees collaborating and competing.

Rosalind Franklin is among the more prominent of those names. She had made a name for herself in the previous decade with her work on the molecular structure of coal, and was widely regarded as a pre-eminent scientist for much of her adult life. She was funded more than once to go on a lecture tour of the US. The PhD students who helped her with her work tended to be somewhat in awe of her.

I mention this because, whenever you hear that a story is going to be about men who took credit for the work of a woman in times gone by, there’s a certain kind of image that may very naturally tend to form in your head. My own inclination is to picture a bunch of smartly dressed men with great hair and chiselled chins, lounging in very comfortable chairs, laughing uproariously at each other’s jokes, probably drinking brandy, and talking either lecherously or condescendingly at the one person who does all the actual work around here whenever she approaches. She’s been hard at work all day doing Science, and can only stammer meekly when the boisterous men grab the paradigm-shattering paper she’s written out of her hands, tell her not to worry her pretty self about this deoxy-ribo-stuff any more, and shoo her away.

And the reason I wanted to emphasise that, to an extent, Rosalind Franklin really was respected and recognised as a serious scientist in her lifetime, is to avoid letting you settle on the above scenario as your idea of what her career was like. Because that scenario is something out of a cartoon. It doesn’t do the feminist cause any favours to imagine that sexist bias only looks like that cartoon, because then it’s all too easy to suppose that sexism just isn’t something that happens any more. We’re done with all that chauvinistic nonsense. The feminists have won. We don’t see those fat-cats sitting around guffawing self-importantly and smacking the womyn-folk on the backside as they leave any more, therefore we have defeated all gender bias in the workplace.

Yeah, um, no. That’s not how sexism usually works. It’s a much more subtle bastard than that, and is something that Rosalind Franklin had to work against in decidedly more insidious ways.

Two years before she was born, women in England didn’t have the right to vote. When she was growing up, intelligence was not always seen as a desirable quality in women; when she was six years old, her aunt observed that she seemed “alarmingly clever”, and did not mean this as a compliment. Women who were clever could get into all sorts of trouble. While Rosalind was at school, the debate society discussed topics such as “That the Entry of Women into Public Affairs and Industry is to be Deplored”. After she got the highest mark in the Cambridge chemistry entrance exam at age 17, she would not be recognised as a “member of the University”, and could not earn an official degree.

She was also Jewish, at a time when many areas of employment and government departments would either not permit entrance to Jews at all, or would place a cap on the number or proportion of Jews allowed in. The fear was that Jews would simply overrun the place if such measures were not installed, and if admission were based solely on, well, actual merit and capability.

From what I’ve read of her career, though, once she’d established her credentials as an excellent scientist and was studying the structures of DNA and viruses full-time, it doesn’t seem like she was constantly fighting an uphill struggle against her gender simply to earn any scant recognition. There was no institutional scorn surrounding the very idea of a woman doing such complicated work. She published 45 scientific papers, a lot for such a short life. Her work was respected. But when most scientists are having their work discussed or giving lectures, we’re not told how, as well as providing fascinating insight into the field of X-ray crystallography, they could probably look quite nice if they did something with their hair.

It was not only complicated work that she was doing, but vitally important, too. Rosalind made arguably as significant a contribution as anyone to the discovery of the structure of DNA – in particular, she took the X-Ray diffraction image that inspired Crick and Watson to produce their famous model. It was a higher quality image than anyone else had managed to produce of its kind, anywhere.

It’s another over-simplification to say that anyone simply stole her data, though. Raymond Gosling was Rosalind’s PhD student at the time, and was involved in the taking of the photograph. Some months after it was taken, he showed it to Maurice Wilkins, who also worked in their department at King’s College London. Wilkins showed it to Watson, and this too seems to have been done in a justified spirit of openness and collaboration. It wasn’t any kind of a “smoking gun” piece of evidence, with vast significance in and of itself. It hadn’t been marked for any kind of secrecy. And Rosalind wasn’t the be-all and end-all of DNA research at the college. The worst you can really say of anyone’s behaviour in this regard, it seems, is that it was ungallant of them not to have at least kept her in the loop – and, certainly, not to have given her work more prominent credit when the famous paper was published.

She was increasingly ill in her final months and weeks, and underwent a number of operations. The unfairness that frustrated her and stopped her getting done everything she wanted to get done was due to the cancer, more than to any systematic gender bias. She was eulogised fondly by her colleagues immediately following her death, and her family were astonished at quite how influential their Rosalind – who had never liked to bore the non-scientists in her life with the technical and incomprehensible details of her work, and was too modest to try to convey its importance – had apparently been.

But outside of her immediate circle of colleagues, it was a long time before Rosalind’s involvement in this particular discovery was ever fully understood or appreciated. James Watson’s 1968 book The Double Helix is perhaps the most widely known account of the years surrounding the crucial paper, and has been lauded as a highly personal and detailed scientific account, but it also seems to be where a lot of the accusations of sexist bias lead back to. Lines like “the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab” wouldn’t win him many friends today – and his generally dismissive approach to the role that Rosalind played didn’t go down well with those who’d known her at the time, either.

Many of Rosalind’s colleagues wrote to Watson objecting to his unfair portrayal before the book was published. Under some duress, he added an epilogue and admitted to have developed some respect for her achievements in the time since he’d made those first impressions. But Harvard University Press eventually backed out of publishing it altogether. Maurice Wilkins in particular described the book as being “unfair to me, to Dr Crick and to almost everyone mentioned except Professor Watson himself”. At the very least, Watson seems to have found it difficult to acknowledge the contributions of a number of other people to his work, and to have spent a good deal of time in the following years trying to justify certain of his actions, which he may have come to feel guiltier about than he admitted at the time.

Aside from the various links scattered throughout this article, pretty much my only source for all this has been the 2002 biography Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, by Brenda Maddox. (Perhaps not great scholarship under usual conditions to have such a limited set of references, but I’m pretty sure the overall impression I’ve conveyed here is appropriately balanced and accurate.)

I’ll close with a quote from a letter that Rosalind wrote to her father from University, where he was worried that she was “making science her religion”. It’s one of the finest summaries of humanist philosophy I’ve read.

Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than that they lead to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)…

I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining…

I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals… I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.

In 1997, Janet Murray published Hamlet on the Holodeck. It was one of the first attempts, from within the humanities, to gauge and classify the storytelling potential of the digital medium. Except for the notable influence of Brenda Laurel’s earlier research into computers as theatre, Murray drew primarily from the work of programmers and designers at Xerox PARC and DARPA. She combined technical knowledge with years of experience as a scholar of Victorian literature and science fiction. While recognizing a potential for the misuse of technology, she predicted a utopian future where we would co-create narratives of romance, danger, and exploration within a seamless virtual reality. This is considered a primary text of the “narratology” school of game studies, although Murray herself has always encouraged others to study games as distinct from their capacity to tell stories.

Murray explicated the four essential properties of the digital medium: it is procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic.

Procedurality refers to the computer’s ability to execute code.

The computer is participatory insofar as it responds to input.

Spatiality means that the computer can model space and time.

The encyclopedic capacity comes from the computer’s ability to store more information than any prior physical media.

Murray’s discussion recognizes that procedurality is the medium’s unique and defining trait, but she gives them all equal consideration. She pairs off these properties to explain where complex structures in computing come from. Procedurality and participation combine to form interactivity. Spatiality and participation together lead to the navigability of virtual space (following the advent of the graphical user interface). Encyclopedic capacity and spatiality give rise to the field of information design, primarily concerned with organizing data to make it more transparent, accessible, and compact.

Read the rest of the post at The Border House.

Let’s jump back a bit.

The first electronic music artist I became really aware of, back during the summer before college, is Laurie Anderson. When William Burroughs died in August 1997, KBOO played a day-long tribute to his work, and I listened and listened as I talked to friends online, on dial-up (!), being amazed at discovering all of these things at the end of someone’s life. One of the pieces they played was “Sharkey’s Night“, which stuck with me so strongly that’s it’s half of why we have a cat named Mudshark (the other half being Lucas’s Frank Zappa obsession).

I love how she uses sound manipulation to not just make music, but to flesh out the story. In “The Cultural Ambassador”, she says,

I’ve done quite a few of these sort of impromptu new music concerts for small groups of detectives and customs agents [while traveling overseas during the Gulf War] and I’d have to keep setting all this stuff up and they’d listen for a while and they’d say:

”So uh, what’s this?”

And I’d pull out something like this filter and say:

”Now this is what I’d like to think of as the voice of Authority.”

And it would take me a while to tell them how I used it for songs that were, you know, about various forms of control, and they would say:

”Now, why would you want to talk like that?”

And I’d look around at the SWAT teams and the undercover agents and the dogs and the radio in the corner, tuned to the Superbowl coverage of the war. And I’d say:

”Take a wild guess.”

“O Superman” is another of my favorites, combining synthesizers and choral effects and the opening beat, “ah ah ah ah ah ah”, which she sings along with and imitates as the song progresses.

Let’s jump back a bit further.

The most hardcore, old-school, everything built from scratch electronic musician I know of is Delia Derbyshire. She’s best known for the original performance of the Dr. Who theme song, but more of her work has been resurrected from the archives in the last few years and you can find a decent sampling on YouTube and fan sites. What impresses me about her work is that there really wasn’t a roadmap at that point for how to work with these tools, but she tried things and worked it out, and inspired others, to beautiful effect.

To finish, someone more recent.

I only started listening to Imogen Heap‘s music in the last year, when I picked up a copy of her most recent album, Ellipse. I bought the bonus track version, which for a couple dollars more gives you instrumental versions of all of the tracks. Sometimes the vocals in a song can push the instrumental parts to the background, so the opportunity to hear how it works without them is really helpful. In interviews, she talks about recording layers and layers of ambient noises, acoustic sounds, then manipulating them digitally to get the desired effect. So I listen, to try to understand how the song is put together, and bridge the gap from what I know how to do with software and synthesizers to the effects I’m hearing.

Electronic music is perhaps not the first thing people think of when we talk about technology, but to me it fits right in. The process of learning to use new synthesizers and mixers reminds me of what it felt like to be learning to turn my beginner code skills into the ability to write a full application. Sometimes we create technology, not for a specific functional goal, but for art.

Cambridge-based Science Club for Girls asked a number of women who work in science and technology, including me, to write a letter to our younger selves as part of their celebration of Women’s History Month. Inspired by picking up a soldering iron for the first time in years and making an Atari Punk Console at Music Hack Day last fall, I wrote the following to my 13-year-old self (who, yes, is the dorky kid in the picture), in the summer before I started high school. Note the postscript, which references the first album I remember actively acquiring.

Dear Debbie:

It’s cold and bright here in Boston, and I’m sure it’s hot and bright where you are. Right now, you’re taking Grade 9 math (or, as I’ve learned to say now that I live in the US, 9th grade math) in summer school, before you start high school, so you can get ahead in your math requirements.  It’s a good place to start.

You’ve registered to take auto shop and electrical shop at your new school in the fall. I hate to say this, but the classes are kind of going to suck. You’ll be the only girl in both, and the boys are going to give you a hard time, and the teachers aren’t going to notice or care. And someone is going to steal your notes right before the electrical shop exam. (Don’t worry – you’ll do fine. Just make sure you check your math!).

It’s not going to be the best of experiences, but I want you to hold onto how much you love making stuff. Remember when you were really little, and you spent all your time in the basement with LEGO, Tinker Toys, and puzzles? I know that your favorite free-time activity these days is reading, but I want to encourage you to keep finding ways to create things. Keep writing programs for your Apple IIe. Ask our parents for some of the new LEGO Technic. Look in the phone book for a place to buy model rocketry stuff. Setting off explosions kind of scares you, yes. But I also know that you can do things that scare you – that’s why you learned how to weld in metal shop last year, right?

Because here’s the thing: you’re good at math and physics. Yes, I know you haven’t done any physics yet – I promise you, you’re good at it. And that’ll get you really far – through college (whoops, that’s ‘university’ to you) and graduate school. But no one is really going to give you many opportunities to build things, and you’ll really want to, trust me. There’s a distinctive pleasure to holding something that you’ve made, and you’ll get a tremendous confidence boost from it – it’s the difference between, “I’m not sure,” and “Of course I can.” Figuring out how to solve a physics problem is one thing; figuring out how to put something together is quite another. You’ll get lots of practice with the first, but you’ll need to make your own experiences with the second.

So go out there and start making things. And keep making things.

But let me tell you – the future is pretty awesome. Just one example: you know that new Apple Macintosh computer that Ms. Hamilton, the librarian, got this year to catalog the library? And how cool it was compared to all the Apple IIs in the computer lab? You will not believe what I’m holding in my hand right now…

Much love from the 21st century,

Deb

PS: Can I ask you a favor? David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the LP that you have? Would you mind hanging on to it? Your future self thanks you.

[cross-posted from here]

As a professional writer, I’m naturally drawn to others with an affinity for words and sentences. I’m especially fond of those who use their facility with words to change the world and make it a more just and humane place. Last year, I told you about Ronda Hauben, the auto worker who knew the future was in building electronic communities. This year, I want to highlight someone with a little higher profile, but who has also used her writing to help us along the path.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (please explore the topography of the home page before clicking Enter)  is a writer of superlative speculative fiction, but maybe you know that already. Wikipedia, as usual, offers an excellent introduction to Le Guin’s life and career. Fantastic Fiction also has a nice bibliography (though the site looks like it hasn’t been redesigned since 1997). But what does a fiction writer who seems more interested in social issues rather than hard science have to do with Ada Lovelace?

Well, science is a broad category, and Le Guin (UKL, for short) clearly shares her father’s interest in what makes humans (and humanoids) tick. UKL shines a light on contemporary society through the descriptions of alien cultures. As she put it in a recent interview with a science blogger: “‘The future’ in most science fiction is just a metaphor for ‘us, here, now.’” But it isn’t entirely because of her writing that I’m paying tribute today.

If you care about writing, creativity, and the ability to make a living from same, you’ll be wise to follow the court battle over Google’s plan to digitize and effectively own every book ever created. It’s one thing to want to create a free digital library available to all. It’s quite another to create that library in the interest of profit.

UKL resigned from the Author’s Guild when that organization (along with a batch of publishers) agreed to a settlement of the copyright infringement case against Google. She helped mobilize the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and the National Writers Union to oppose the settlement. And with the help of the US Justice Department, we just might win.

Thanks, Ms. Le Guin, for being inspirational in both your writing, and in helping us to understand that the struggle for our rights never ends.

Now it’s your turn. There’s a lot of time for you to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. If you blog, check out Finding Ada and sign up. If not, comment here about women in science and tech that helped make you what you are today. Feel free to comment on the Google Settlement and Ursula K. Le Guin too! Check out the other ALD10 blogs too.

One common narrative early women in technical professions had constructed for themselves was that of downplaying the challenges (or any role at all) of gender in their careers. Nora Stanton Blatch, a fiery women’s rights activist and civil engineer, broke this mold in the early 20th century. She was a rare technical woman working to connect her profession and her suffrage activism. Trained at Cornell as part of the first classes of women accepted to its Sibley School of Engineering, she once said that she had chosen civil engineering as her major because it was the most male-dominated field she could find. Her feminism was no accident: the granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and daughter of Harriet Stanton Blatch, she was raised in a milieu of struggle. Ruth Oldenziel suggests that her “rich feminist heritage enabled her to envision a narrative device in which to frame her life story.”

For a short period of time, Nora was married to the electronics engineer and radio and TV inventor Lee de Forest. As an engineering partnership, they pioneered radio broadcasting and, as a first transmission of their wireless phone in 1909, Harriet Blatch gave a speech declaring “Travel by stagecoach is out of date. Kings are out of date: communication by canalboat is out of date; an aristocracy is out of date, none more so than a male aristocracy.” But after their first child was born, Lee began to rail publicly against Nora’s insistence on continuing to work as an engineer at New York City public works departments and as a suffrage activist. They divorced soon after: Nora was now an engineer and a single mother, continuing to value both her work and family.

Nora’s feminist activism in engineering included professional societies. She was accepted into the American Society of Civil Engineers as a “junior member” in the early stages of her career, but once she turned 32, their age limit, she was booted out, despite her experience at bridge and hydraulic firms and in government, including supervising draftsmen. The ASCE was trying to stake out the rapidly professionalizing field of engineering as a high-status, high-class profession, and one way they did that was by strictly limiting membership, excluding surveyors, for instance, and certainly excluding women. Nora sued the ASCE for membership in 1916, but lost her suit; no women joined the society until 1927.  Nora died in 1971 after a long life of activism.

Further reading:

Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine

Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America

This hurried blog isn’t the place to explore and understand these all in detail. Lee Miller was a breakthrough figure for a number of reasons – this is just a snapshot.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York state in 1907, Elizabeth “Lee” Miller left for Paris at the age of eighteen where, according to Ursula Butler:

“She studied lighting, costume and theatre design at Ladislas Medgyes’s School of Stagecraft. She later returned to New York and enrolled in the Art Students League. There she met Condé Nast and he introduced Miller to the world of modeling. From 1926-1929 she modeled, but eventually wanted to see what life was like behind the camera. Miller studied under the great dada-surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Under his supervision, Miller learned how to manipulate the photograph to make a self-contained, semi-abstract or dreamlike image.”

She also became his wife and established her own studio. So far so interesting, but things were just hotting up.

The word ‘photography’ was coined by scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel in 1839 (though it had been coined seperately by Hercules Florence in 1834!) and is actually is derived from two Greek words: ‘photos’ meaning light and ‘graphein’ meaning draw. The pace of technology development in cameras and photography accelerated during the early twentieth centry, but our subject’s contribution to the science of photography was a marriage of chance and artistry. Miller brought the alchemy.

Much debate surrounds the issue as to which of the couple stumbled across a technique in photography that – like a reverse negative of the ‘photography’ coinage – had been discovered a few times previously but not clearly defined and adopted: namely solarisation.

“The effect was usually caused by inadvertent severe over-exposure or occasionally by accidentally exposing an exposed plate or film to light before processing. Artist Man Ray perfected the technique which was accidentally discovered in his darkroom by his assistant Lee Miller.” [Wikpedia]

Whatever the facts, Man Ray was soon flying the flag for perfecting this technique whilst his collaborator Miller was merely, again, known as his model (although she marshalled the technique to equally compelling effect – see her above ‘Portrait of an Unknown Woman’ from 1930). Man Ray was of the controlling variety, and Miller being a woman of substance soon broke free of his grip. She continued to be deeply involved in the Surrealist movement, amassing a body of work in her late twenties and early thirties that puts her on a par with the leading figures in photographic art and photo journalism, though this has only been recognised in the last two decades after her death, thanks to the meticulous recovery, ordering and promotion of her archives by her son.

A friend of Picasso – and combining commercial fashion photography and artistic work while entwined in a bohemian milieu – what beguiles me is the mastery she achieved in the realm of photography by bringing with her all her selves as she worked though each chapter of her career and each dimension of her work. There was truth and artifice – with neither undermining the other – in her iconic photo ‘Women with fire masks’ (1941), taken on the street of her own residence in Hampstead.

Conversely, when Vogue sent her off with a Rolliflex to Europe to cover the end of the war and the liberation, her photos combined a self-sufficient, often mysterious power with a visceral sense of unfolding drama. As she travelled through a bombed-out, shattered Europe, her camera captured many of the most powerful images of the closing months of that dark chapter in the last century. From the Italian front and the first ever use of Napalm at the siege of St Malo, to the death camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, and the liberation of Paris, you can view a wide selection of her potent war images online in the Lee Miller Archive.

Mistress of the lens, at the height of her career she lived for several years in this house on Downshire Hill in Hampstead, also spending time in Egypt and travelling widely, before moving to Farley Farm House in east Sussex. She had two further marriages, the second to British surrealist artist Roland Penrose whom she stayed with.

After the war, whilst still doing the occasional fashion shoot, Miller’s overall profile declined and she suffered bouts of clinical depression alleged (in retrospect) to have been symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the horrors she had seen while on war assignment. In turn, her ironic sensibility was reinforced with disillusionment at the limited type of commercial work she was being offered. Women en masse had successfully taken on all sorts of previously “male” roles during the conflict, and as a surrealist photojournalist embedded with the US army Miller was among them. But after the war, governments scrambled to promote traditional values in their efforts to glue broken societies back together, and opportunities for women in the working world shrank.

In her lifetime, she was all to aware of the cultural – and personal – impact of womens’ abilities and output being marginalised. A photograph she composed of Max Ernst and his partner, artist Dorothea Tanning, encapsulates her subversive take on this.

The recognition she has posthumously achieved was acknowledged on a grand scale some 30 years after her death in a major retrospective at the V&A in 2007, which I attended, plus coverage and exhibitions globally in the last decade. Now the scales have been duly re-balanced, we can celebrate Miller as a true icon and pioneer in the art and technology of photography. For innovation and inspiration personified, look to Lee Miller on Ada Lovelace Day.

–

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual worldwide day of blogging to celebrate the achievement of women in science and technology. More information on Ada Lovelace Day 2010 can be found on the Finding Ada website.  This post hasn’t been much about technology per se – it’s what we do with it that matters…

And what are the pledges for? It’s a pledge to write on your blog about an admirable woman in technology or science and to then submit the blog to the Finding Ada website, so there is a large collection of stories about women in technology.

I’d like to name Dame Wendy Hall as one of my female technology heroes. Wendy was working at the University of Southampton on hypermedia and multimedia in the mid-1980s – long before the World Wide Web came along. She became the first ever professor of engineering at Southampton in 1994, and went on to head the computer science department from 2002 to 2007. Until July 2008, she was Senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, is currently a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, and is a founder member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council.  She was President of the British Computer Society (2003-4) and an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow from 1996 to 2002.

Since 2008 she has been president of the Association for Computing Machinery. But this would read more like a CV if I just listed Wendy’s achievements and posts held. The really admirable thing about Wendy is that she is a true technology visionary. She was using a version of what we know as the web, about 15 years before the rest of us caught up, and now she is leading international research efforts into the semantic web, the next generation Internet.

So, invoking the spirit of the first ever computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, Dame Wendy Hall please take your place in the Finding Ada roll call!

The second I found out Marilyn was visiting Palo Alto from her hometown New Jersey during Ada Lovelace Day, my schedule turned upside-down. She arranged for me to participate in an awesome interview with Marge Breya. She set aside precious time to meet me — out of so many on her schedule — and, most profoundly, she let me show her my home.

I was honored to be able to drive down the road with her, introduce my family to her, take her to the top of my city San Francisco, dine with her, get a chance to sit and share with her, and follow her in her (tireless, and often sleepless) work dedicated to advocating for others — indeed, to “amplifying the voice of the disenfranchised.” She would find spotlighting herself the least worthy cause of all, and it was only under great collective pressure that she finally cracked and allowed me to allow her to — although she would not say so herself — let her tell it the best.

Ergo — in honor of Ada Lovelace Day 2010, I dedicate this to Marilyn Pratt, a true technology heroine who honors us all and makes advocating for the community her (dare I say our) core business. Without further ado: Marilyn Pratt

BONUS VIDEO! Marilyn at work on Ada Lovelace Day in Palo Alto:

“Amplifying the voice of the disenfranchised doesn’t mean a protest voice — it just means making sure that people who might demur have more focused ability to be visible and make themselves heard.”

– Marilyn Pratt, SAP Community Advocate

In this presentation from the JVM Language Summit 2009, Allison Randal discusses what it means for a language to be dynamic, the spectrum between static and dynamic languages, dynamic typing, dynamic dispatch, introspection, dynamic compilation, dynamic loading, and a summary of the main differences between static and dynamic.

Different ways of looking at things can yield very different, complementary insights, for instance regarding light as waves or particles.

Most languages are actually centering on the middle of the range from very static to very dynamic.

CS has been focusing on the static perspective. (But Smalltalk has been extremely dynamic all along.)

Dynamic vs. static typing is really only about when type constraints are checked. Own note: that’s not completely true – e.g. compiler optimization. Also, later she mentions computing dynamic dispatch at compile time which is only possible with a strong (explicit) type systems.

Dynamic dispatch

Introspection is not necessarily dynamic, just more common in such systems. Information comes from different sources: asking the VM/interpreter, compile-time annotations, execute-time annotations (e.g. annotated stacktraces). Meta object models are essentially introspection information for your object systems, provided by making the classes first-class objects.

Dynamic compilation: lots of options such as eval, JIT, file-based etc. She mentions the REPL without naming it, calling it “interactive compilation” and giving Python as example – odd.

Dynamic loading is surprisingly varied, ranging from linking to name binding to mixins, traits and roles (which often mean the same thing).

Her conclusion is that we’ll have both dynamic and static systems for a long time to come and that’s a good thing. In the end it’s about tighter control vs greater abstraction and productivity vs performance.

There’s an interesting-looking paper on the Further Reading slide: “Static typing where possible, dynamic typing when needed: the end of the cold war between programming languages” by E. Meijer and P. Drayton.

Hey, it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

Today I get to kill two birds with one stone. It is Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science. Seeing that I’m just about to publish notes on a talk by Allison, why not write a little about her. And there sure is a lot to write.

I became aware of Allison’s work when I got interested in the Perls, both 5 and 6. When I start something new, I like to dig deeply into the web community around it; it tells you something about the culture surrounding a product. If you do that for Perl, it’s impossible to miss Allison.

The blurb on her website says

Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding seduced her away from natural languages to artificial ones. A C and dynamic language (Perl/Python/Ruby/etc) programmer by trade, Allison is the architect of Parrot, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon Press. She also works for O’Reilly Media, planning the program for their Open Source Convention (OSCON).”

Naturally, for Perl people writing this up means repeating the obvious. But given the unfortunate perception of Perl these days, it’s worth showing that cool things are still happening in that community. Like Perl 6 and Parrot. A virtual machine that can run 30+ languages? Check.

Allison is one of the lead developers as well as a manager for both Perl 6 and Parrot. She also wrote the current version of the Artistic License that Perl uses. You can easily find lots of talks she’s been giving over the years at many conferences. So for Ada Lovelace day, thank you Allison for all your hard work for Perl!

According to the Finding Ada website “Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software. Read more on Wikipedia.”

Last year, a group of people decided to raise the profile of women in tech and science by getting a pledge from 1,000 people to blog, vlog, report, etc. about a woman they personally admire in those fields on March 24, Ada Lovelace Day.  I was one of the close to 2,000 folks who spoke up to support women in tech.

In my post for Ada Lovelace Day last year “Mena, My Grandma and the Webernets?” I talked a little bit about how Six Apart (the major blogging platform service company run by Mena Trott) impacted my life and my participation in social media.

It really is just as easy this year as it was last year to choose and highlight one woman on her hustle in the tech industry. We’ll keep it short and sweet.

Dina Kaplan, 2009. Photo Credit: CC Chapman

Meet Dina Kaplan, co-founder of blip.tv. Blip.tv is the official video platform for my food website and, like me, Dina kickstarted her professional life as a journalist, working everywhere from MTV News (and on Rock the Vote, in ’96) to DC to local broadcast here in NYC, the country’s number 1 television market.

I’m see Dina at industry events frequently and she is constantly on her hustle. But she also shows that graciousness and ability to stand still and actually listen that I really admire. Not only that, but Blip.tv is an elegant, easy-to-use platform that I believe will only continue to blow up.

She is super smart, well-respected and she is also part of great team. Everyone I’ve encountered at Blip.tv, whether it be from the support team, to the executives they have blogging on Tumblr to random folks I’ve met and only later found out where they worked, they have been across the board nice people who are also knowledgeable and approachable.

I’m a big believer that your team is reflective of you and how you run your company, so I have to give major props to Dina for having surrounded herself with capable, motivated folks.

Big ups, Dina. You rock it.

What about you? What women do you admire professionally, especially in the fields of technology and science? Please leave a comment and teach me about your favorites.

Want to pay tribute to your trailblazers and give women a boost worldwide? You can submit your creative project at any point today, March 24, 2010. Details here: http://findingada.com/

And what are the pledges for? It’s a pledge to write on your blog about an admirable woman in technology or science and to then submit the blog to the Finding Ada website, so there is a large collection of stories about women in technology.

I’d like to name Maggie Philbin from the BBC as one of my female technology heroes. Why Maggie? Well I know a lot of the Finding Ada blogs will be about academic heroes, or Nobel laureates, but I thought I would mention someone who really convinced me to get into technology myself in the first place because of her TV work on technology.

When I became old enough to understand technology programmes on TV, the flagship science and technology show on the BBC was called Tomorrow’s World – a show Maggie presented for 8 years. You can take a look at the BBC archive of Tomorrow’s World shows here – I particularly like the Christmas 1982 edition as it has the theme music I always preferred.

Maggie was always the least geeky, most normal and down to earth, of the Tomorrow’s World presenters, something reassuring when I was a young kid who could write software on every microcomputer on the market – before I even owned one. I would hang around in department stores studying them, exploring the chip-set, and often breaking them in the process as I loitered around the shop bashing Z80 assembler into a 6502 chip. But I never saw my own interest as something geeky – it was a means to an end, and meant I could get the computer to do things that were fun, such as writing my own games.

Maggie Philbin always made technology in the 1980s really interesting – and fun. Just look at this video of satellite TV from 1989 – before satellite TV had actually launched in the UK! I’m sure there was a plan and a script, but it looks more like ad lib, because of course they used to broadcast live back then – so there were occasional technology disasters when the supposed new technology just did not work on TV.

So if I was going to explore how I ended up taking the career path I did, first into software development and eventually writing and teaching about technology (and the effects of technology), then the BBC bears much of the responsibility. First for broadcasting a prime time show like Tomorrow’s World with such memorable antics as spreading jam on a CD to see if the laser would still work. Then second, for memorable presenters like Maggie making the subject matter interesting and connecting it to real life, rather than just being the stuff of the laboratory.

So Maggie, please join the others on the Finding Ada list of honour!