Specialization: Information Technology: Historical to Policy Considerations
Description
This specialization is designed for students interested in the history of information and
associated technologies (computing, telecommunications, automation, emergent
technologies: bio-nano technology) and/or historically informed information technology
policies. The emphasis is placed on European contexts. The list of possible topics includes:
Historical Issues: The analog-digital debate, the emergence and establishment of the
software-hardware demarcation and the persistence of a software crisis, the transition
from the ideal of a computer utility to the realities of personal computing, the history of
human computers, the transition from the computer being a mathematical machine to
the computer being a communication device, continuities and discontinuities from the
history of the telegraph to the history of the internet, the convergence of computing,
telecommunications, and biotechnology, information technology and the emergence of
nanotechnology.
Policy Issues: The emergence and elaboration of (national and/or international) state and
business institutions and practices that affected information technology. Possible topics:
activities of executive, legislative, and judicial authorities, firm and inter-firm actions,
initiatives of scientific and professional institutions (societies, clubs, associations, councils,
committees, chambers, etc.), the place of regulatory and standardization institutions, the
role of award and patent related institutions. Information Technology, Social Sciences, and
Humanities (Historical Computing or History and Computing).
Core Literature
- Blok, Aad, and Greg Downey. eds. 2003. Uncovering Labour in the Information
Revolutions, 1750-2000. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Coopey, Richard. ed. 2004. Information Technology Policy: An International History.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Hashagen, Ulf, Reinhard Keil-Slawik, and Arthur Norberg. eds. 2002. History of
Computing: Software Issues. Berlin: Springer.
- Kubicek, Herbert, William H. Dutton, and Robin Williams. eds. 1997. The Social Shaping
of Information Superhighways: European and American Roads to the Information
Society. New York: St. Martin's Press.
- Hannah Landecker. 2007. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
- MacKenzie, Donald. 1996. Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press.
- Tympas, Aristotle. 2004. Calculation and Computation. In New Dictionary of the History of
Ideas, Volume I. Maryanne Cline Horowitz. ed. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 255-
259.
- Tympas, Aristotle. 2005. Computers: Analog, and, Computers Hybrid. In Encyclopedia of 20th- Century Technology. Colin Hempstead. ed. London: Routledge. 195-199, and, 202-204
Language of Instruction
English
Minimum and Maximum Number of Students
1-5
Thesis Topics Samples
- Competing information technology traditions and policies-local, regional, trans-regional,
national, international (e.g. Europe vs. the US, the European North vs. the European
South, competing national or regional computing traditions)
- History of reconfiguration of information technology in use: from scientific to business
and government uses (e.g., computing in biomedicine, telecommunications in firm or
ministry accounting)
- Public image of information technology and science
Schedule of Introductory Course
6 three-hour meetings at the beginning of ESST's second semester.
Specialization Coordinator
Aristotle Tympas, tympas@phs.uoa.gr
Lists of Possible Thesis Tutors
Aristotle Tympas
Associate Professor
Philosophy and History of Science Department
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
tympas@phs.uoa.gr (www.phs.uoa.gr/hst)
Research Interests: History of Info/Bio Technology, Info/Bio Technology Policy
Yiannis Caloghirou
Associate Professor
Chemical Engineering Department
National Technical University of Athens
y.caloghirou@ntua.gr, (http://www.chemeng.ntua.gr)
Research Interests: Technology Policy, Industrial Policy
Web Link
ESST at the Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
(GPHPST), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and National Technical
University of Athens, Greece
www.hpst.phs.uoa.gr