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Ada Lovelace Day
Oct. 16th, 2012 16:53Having just sustained a conversation with a highly skeptical (and, I suspect, rather sexist) colleague about her and her place in history, let me take a moment to wish everyone a Happy Ada Lovelace Day.
Ada Lovelace Day honors Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer. This post by the Ada Initiative has more details on Lovelace's achievement, as well as the depressing (and depressingly predictable) attempts by later people to deny her importance and her authorship of her own computer program. As Ada Initiative co-founder Valerie Aurora concludes,
As Aurora notes, these tactics and beliefs are right out of Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing. The Ada Initiative seeks to support and increase the numbers and representation of women in open technology and culture, and needs donors to continue its work. At the same time, here's a pro tip to aspiring scholars: the way to accurately represent history is not to assume that women's history hasn't been suppressed, or that women have no place in history, whether you're aware of their contributions or not.
Ada Lovelace Day honors Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer. This post by the Ada Initiative has more details on Lovelace's achievement, as well as the depressing (and depressingly predictable) attempts by later people to deny her importance and her authorship of her own computer program. As Ada Initiative co-founder Valerie Aurora concludes,
In the end, most arguments that Lovelace did not write the first program only make sense in the context of a common assumption: in any partnership between a man and woman, the man did the important work and the woman assisted and polished. […] In 2012, we should not be denigrating women’s accomplishments in science based on specious arguments about personality, occasional errors, and collaborations with men. That’s one of the purposes of Ada Lovelace Day: to bring recognition to women who have had credit for their accomplishments stolen from them.
As Aurora notes, these tactics and beliefs are right out of Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing. The Ada Initiative seeks to support and increase the numbers and representation of women in open technology and culture, and needs donors to continue its work. At the same time, here's a pro tip to aspiring scholars: the way to accurately represent history is not to assume that women's history hasn't been suppressed, or that women have no place in history, whether you're aware of their contributions or not.