vla22: photo of Atli's throne, Torcello, Venice (Default)
[personal profile] vla22
So obviously being on strike means I can work on my project on the Cavendish "computors" and other women in early computing in Cambridge. You know, the project that's not part of my job or PhD, but which I'm doing anyway, because I have a fantastic opportunity.

I'm seeking funding for a summer student. I've got plans for what they can work on. There are other things people could help me out with, especially if you're in Cambridge. Many of these things will require visiting libraries and other University sites; these should only be done when we're not on strike, so we're not crossing the picket line.

1. See if there's a way of setting up an access-controlled wiki, ideally hosted on University servers, using Raven/Shibboleth for authentication. The reason for access control is that later on, we may be collecting personal data, and I'd need to show that we'd used proper data security processes to ensure that people didn't have access to anything inappropriate. At this stage of the project, we'd be gathering data that we're entitled to see anyway, but this may change. This is quite a high priority, as it will be useful to share what we've looked at.

2. Find out where Departmental photos are stored (for Physics and the Computer Lab).

3. Find out if the Computer Lab (sorry, Department of Computer Science and Technology) or UIS holds any archives on the staff that were employed. Note: please don't try to look at this data if they hold it - I'd need to sort out proper GDPR stuff for that. At this stage, it would be useful to know what they hold.

4. Look at the Reporter for 1949-1975ish for: lists of Faculty Members, lists of University Officers, and lists of PhD awards (i.e. the lists of name and thesis title). You are looking for the women, or theses from the MRC, Crystallography and Radio Astronomy fields that may have had a substantial computing component (or theses from the Computer Lab by women). There will be some obvious easy targets; a full survey will take forever and will basically involve living in the UL and summoning up all the theses from the period and seeing whether someone wrote something relevant. It can be done over time, but there are probably some easy ways in. It may also be interesting to record gender statistics (I'm assuming that at this period, it may be easy to identify women in many lists, as they'll be prefixed by Miss or Mrs.)

5. Look at the theses, or at least get the catalogue number for future summoning. Not all theses will be readable.

6. Look at MRC and Crystallography papers for computing. This probably involves finding the major journals in the field, hoping they're online, and searching for EDSAC, EDSAC II and TITAN, in the first instance.

If anyone's able to make a start on any of that, it would be helpful!
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