Babbage's two lives

Babbage wrote two relatively detailed, yet significantly incongruous, autobiographical accounts of his pre-Cambridge and Cambridge days. He published one in 1864 and in it advertised the existence of the other, which he carefully retained in manuscript form. The aim of this paper is to chart in some detail for the first time the discrepancies between the two accounts, to compare and assess their relative credibility, and to explain their author's possible reasons for knowingly fabricating the less credible of the tw

Complejidad y dimensiones en los estudios sobre Babbage: la máquina analítica. Un análisis del fracaso cultural del primer proyecto de calculadora digital programable secuencialmente.

En este artículo se analiza el caso histórico de la máquina analítica de Babbage junto con algunos otros ejemplos relacionados, con la intención de comprender qué tipo de condiciones retrasaron el advenimiento de la > hasta un siglo después de los primeros diseños de calculadoras programables multi-propósito. La respuesta a este interrogante proviene de una hibridación entre el enfoque socioeconómico de los estudios de ciencia, tecnología y sociedad y la teoría de la complejidad aplicada a los fenómenos sociales en la historia de la técnica. Como conclusión se prueba que el propio Babbage pudo ser consciente de estas constricciones en la estructura social de los medios de producción que retrasarían la emergencia del cálculo automático durante un siglo.This article analyses the historical case of the Babbage's machine and other related examples in order to understand the conditions delaying the coming of the •computer revolution· during one century since the first designs of programmable calculators. The response derives from the joining of both che STS socioeconomic approach and the complexity theory applied to social phenomena in the history of technology. As a result, it is showed that Babbage could be conscious of these constrictions in the social structure, which would be responsible for the delay of the emergence of automatic calculus during one century

Le regard français de Charles Babbage (1791-1871)sur le « déclin de la science en Angleterre »

Dans l’imagerie classique des informaticiens, Charles Babbage (1791-1871) est souvent considéré comme le « père » ou le « pionnier » de l’ordinateur : les plans de sa « machine analytique » sont en effet ceux d’une calculatrice automatique et mécanique à programme externe, susceptible de calculer aussi bien sur des nombres que sur des symboles. Cette imagerie conforte l’histoire hagiographique des génies isolés, puisque d’après cette perspective, il faut attendre un siècle, essentiellement autour d’Alan Turing (1912-1954) et de John von Neumann (1903-1957), pour voir se concrétiser la réalisation de ce nouveau type de machines. Mon propos est de restituer cet apport de Babbage dans un contexte plus vaste que ne le dessine une histoire strictement conceptuelle. Babbage était en effet un mathématicien fasciné à la fois par le développement industriel de son pays, et par la réorganisation des institutions du savoir en France, issue de la Révolution Française. C’est fort de cette volonté réformatrice qu’il s’attaque à ce qu’il qualifie en 1830 de « déclin de la science anglaise ». En dépit de la finesse prospective de ses analyses et de ses projets, il demeure cependant un « gentleman amateur », travaillant dans son atelier personnel à l’élaboration de ses machines. Confronter les différentes facettes du projet de Babbage à la situation effective des relations entre science et industrie, tant en France qu’en Angleterre, peut permettre d’éclairer l’évolution de cette situation jusqu’à la réalisation effective de l’« analyseur harmonique » de Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) en 1876.Traditional accounts of computing view Charles Babbage (1791-1871) as the “father” or “pioneer” of the computer. Actually, Babbage’s planned “analytical engine” corresponds to an automatic mechanical computing machine with an external program that works using both symbols and numbers. This traditionalist view reinforces the hagiographic history of isolated geniuses in the history of science. Such histories suggest that in the century following Babbage’s death, relatively little occurred in “computing” until Alan Turing (1912-1954) and John von Neumann (1903-1957) works. My research situates Babbage within his context and broadens the account by extending beyond a mere history of ideas. Babbage, as a mathematician, was fascinated both by the industrial development of Britain as well as the post-Revolutionary organisation of institutions of knowledge in France. Babbage looked at what he termed “the decline of English science” from this view, though he himself continued to behave as a “gentleman amateur”, working on his machines in his personal workshop. In addition, situating Babbage’s analytical designs within the context of relationships emerging between science and industry in France and England in the 19th century helps to better highlight the deeply industrial context within which Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) built his own harmonic analyzer in 1876

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, and the Rise of the Algorithm, 1605–1862

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed in the three centuries prior to the development of the modern computer. Bringing together the histories of semiotics, poetics, and mathematics, I show that the present divide between algorithmic and interpretive methods results from a cluster of assumptions about historical change that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that implicates attempts to give meaning to algorithms in the modern narrative of technological progress. My account organizes the early-modern discourse on algorithms into three distinct intellectual traditions that arose in subsequent periods. The first tradition, which reached its peak in the mid-seventeenth century, held that the correspondence between algorithm and meaning was guaranteed by divine providence, making algorithms a potential basis for a non- arbitrary mode of representation that can apply to any field of knowledge, including poetics as well as mathematics. A second tradition, most influential from the last decades of the seventeenth century to around 1800, denied that the correspondence between algorithm and meaning was pre-ordained and sought, instead, to create this correspondence by altering the ways people think. Finally, starting in the Romantic period, algorithms and culture came to be viewed as operating autonomously from one another, an intellectual turn that, I argue, continues to inform the way people view algorithms in the present day. By uncovering this history, this dissertation reveals some of the tacit assumptions that underlie present debates about the interface between computation and culture. The reason algorithms present humanists with a meaning problem, I argue, is that cultural and technical considerations now stand in different relations to history: culture is seen as arising from collective practices that lie beyond the control of any individual, whereas the technical details of algorithms are treated as changeable at will. It is because of this compartmentalization, I maintain, that the idea of progress plays such a persistent role in discussions of digital technologies; similarly to the Modernist avant garde, computing machines have license to break with established semantic conventions and thus to lead culture in new directions. As an alternative to this technocratic arrangement, I call for two complementary practices: a philology of algorithms that resituates them in history, and a poetic approach to computation that embraces misalignments between algorithm and meaning

The great logarithmic and trigonometric tables of the French Cadastre: a preliminary investigation

This document is a first investigation of the ''Tables du cadastre,'' Prony's effort to build the greatest monument of science of the French Revolution. The document is supplemented by 47 volumes which make it easier to analyze the original manuscripts