Reflection on where we are going
- Nonlinear
- Ask: What bits of the mushroom have we seen emerge?
- Ask about interconnections in notes
First Memex Assignment
- Questions guiding readings
Jacquard’s the name, weaving’s the game
- Early looms found as early as the 5th millennia
- One of oldest technologies on Earth
- Deep roots are same words as tech
- Weaving is not a machine, as it is a social practice
- Prostheses for further actions in social context
- Linen/Flax:
- Can be turned into thread after beating
- How did someone figure out these skills?
Silk:
- Made in northern China
- Again, how did someone know?
- No one tech exists in a vaccuum, always other things influencing development
- Leading to Silk Road, transporting disease
- Justinian I - wanted origins of silk
Lyon
- Louis XI establishes silk industry
- Wants other goods associated with silk
- Tech development as a result of other factors
- Invades Italy, steals silk-weavers
- Francois I in 16th century funds improvement of silk-making machinery
- Not factories, individuals in their homes weaving
- Could create effect of ‘woven painting’
Jacques de Vaucanson
- Duck machinery, could eat food, waddle around, then poop out the food
- Rubberized intestine
Jaquard
- Life bracketed around French Revolution
- Was a monarchist
- Escapes execution, becomes revolutionary
- Returns penniless, father’s inheritance having run out
- Cult of rationality: what is more rational than a machine?
Napoleon
- Huge effort into fostering technical/scholarly innovation
- Brings scholars when he invades Egypt
- Putting money into innovation expos
- Jacquard uses said money to patent a loom that uses foot pedals, exhibits at Napoleon’s second expo
- Wins medal, enters competition to improve fishnet making, designs loom for that
- What is the history of punch card making?
- Did Jacquard invent the punch card?
- No - Louis Falcon had the draw boy hold the card in place manually
- Did Jacquard invent auto lifting of threads
- No - Vaucanson’s metal cylinder’s could do that
What did Jacquard invent
- Approach that applied threaded together punch cards to the auto control of the loom
- 24 x increase!
- Replicable patterns, complex patterns
- Emergent phenomena of the socio-cultural life of Lyon
- What really matters about Jacquard’s invention are the cards not the loom.
- Programmable, mechanical, external memory
- Seperation of Media
Charles Babbage
- Difference Engine/Analytical Engine
- Difference bc it uses the method of differences to calculate tables by adding the differences between items in a series. But had to be set up manually; no cards
- Well-to-do mathmetician, Could create ‘perfect’ tables
- Never builds it!! Designs 1/7th, then brings it to soirees
- Babbage learns about Jacquard loom, recognizes card as data, a way to write out the intervening calculations, doing different equations
- Similar to Ted Nelson in project Xanadu
Ada Lovelace
- Figures out how to program cards
S Korsakov
- Publishes method for searching info stored on punch cards
- Worked for Russian Police Ministry
- Work didn’t get read in Anglosphere
Hermin Hollerith
- Joins faculty of MIT at 22, works for American Census
- BIL worked in silk industry
- Looks at cards, comes up with device to record card with different columns that the census is after
- Punching card
- Recent innovation of electricity, moving counter
- Will Eventually turn into digital computer
- What are the threads that came together?
What are the Assemblages
Who is left out of the story
What other questions does this story raise?