These are some of our favorite reads for getting started as Computer Scientists.
- Langdon Winner, “Do artifacts have politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor (University of Chicago, 1986). [pdf]
- Agre, Philip E. "Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI." Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work. 1997. [pdf]
- Law, John, “STS as Method” in Hackett, E. J., Amsterdamska, O., Lynch, M., & Wajcman, J. (2008). The handbook of science and technology studies (No. 3rd). The MIT Press. [pdf]
- Our group really liked this overview. The boxed case studies succinctly cover some of the classics of STS.
- Law, John, “STS as Method” in Hackett, E. J., Amsterdamska, O., Lynch, M., & Wajcman, J. (2008). The handbook of science and technology studies (No. 3rd). The MIT Press. [pdf]
- Steve Woolgar, 2004, “What happened to provocation in science and technology studies?”
- Lorraine Daston, 2009, “Science Studies and the History of Science”, Critical Inquiry
- Langdon Winner, “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology,” Science, Technology & Human Values 18 (1993): 362–78.
- T.F. Gieryn, “The Boundaries of Science,” in S. Jasanoff et al., eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), pp. 393-443.
- Sheila Jasanoff, “Contested Boundaries in Policy Relevant Science,” Social Studies of Science, 1987, 17: 195-230.
- Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939,” in Biagioli, The Science Studies Reader
- Really readable & applicable!
- Labinger & Collins (eds.), 2001. The one culture? A conservation about science.
- Marilyn Strathern. 2004. Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. Sean Kingston
- Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), “Introduction,” Chapters 1 and 2 (“A World of Artifice” and “How Social Numbers are Made Valid”) and Chapter 8 (“Objectivity and the Politics of Disciplines”), pp. 3-48 and 193-216.
- Also: the paper version instead: Porter, "Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science"
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), Intro and Part 1 (“State Projects of Legibility and Simplification”) pp. 1-83
- Daston & Galison 2007 Objectivity.
- objectivity through the lens of the visual, and images
Constructions of knowledge
- Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Chapters 2-3 and Conclusion, pp. 22-79 and 332-34z
- D. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991 [1976]), Ch. 1 (“The Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge”), pp. 3-23.
- Barnes & Bloor, 1982, Relativism, rationalism and the sociology of knowledge. In Hollis & Lukes (Eds.) Rationality and relativism.
- This is an excellent source for explaining relativism via the principle of symmetry. Recommend looking at this over chapter 1 of Bloor’s book.
- Jasanoff & Kim (Eds.), 2015, Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power.
- This is a source for the idea of “co-production”, as well as how science fiction informs technology.
- Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles, Signs, 1991, 16: 485-501.
- M. Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in Biagiolo, ed. The Science Studies Reader.
- Ch7, “Actor-Network Theory”. Sismondo, Sergio. An introduction to science and technology studies. Vol. 1. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. [pdf]
- Arthur L. Stinchcombe, 2001. When formality works: Authority and abstraction in law and organizations (Chapters 1-3)
- "ASCII Imperialism" from Espeland, Wendy. "Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life." (2010): 589-590.
- Robert Frodeman and Jonathan Parker. 2009. Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact: The National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts Criterion and the Question of Peer Review. Social Epistemology 23, 3-4 (July 2009), 337–345. [pdf]
- Virginia Eubanks, 2018. Introduction to Automating Inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor.
- Marx, Leo. "‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept." Social Research (1997): 965-988.
- Covers the history & implications of the word & concept of “technology”
- Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (MIT Press, 1994).
- Sawyer, P. H., and R. H. Hilton. "Technical determinism: the stirrup and the plough." (1963): 90-100.
- Trevor Pinch and Ronald Kline, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture, 1996, 37: 763-795.
- Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman. Introduction. 1999. The social shaping of technology. Open University Press, Buckingham, UK.
- Edgerton, David. "Creole technologies and global histories: rethinking how things travel in space and time." History of Science and Technology 1 (2007): 75-112. [pdf]
- Clauder Fischer, 1992, America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940.
- Tom Standage, 1998, The Victorian Internet
- Lessig, Lawrence. "Code is law." The Industry Standard 18 (1999). [pdf]
- Not necessarily in the STS tradition, but short, accessible, interesting to most audiences
- Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore, “STS and Ethics: Implications for Engineering Ethics,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (MIT, 2008). [pdf]
- MacKenzie, Donald. "Missile Accuracy: A Case Study in the Social Processes of Technological Change." In The Social Construction of Technological Systems. Edited by Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), pp. 195-222.
- Morozov 2013 Intro and Chapter 1, To save everything click here: The folly of technological solutionism.
- Virginia Eubanks, 2018. Introduction to Automating Inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor.
- Nina E. Lerman. 2010. Categories of Difference, Categories of Power: Bringing Gender and Race to the History of Technology. Technol. Cult. 51, 4 (2010), 893–918.
- R. A. Nelsen. 2017. Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine. IEEE Ann. Hist. Comput. 39, 1 (January 2017), 29–51.
- Comptuer History Museum's "Timeline of Computer History"
- Paul E. Ceruzzi. 2012. Computing: A Concise History (Mit Press Essential Knowledge). The MIT Press.
These readings are often STS-adjacent, but tend to be accessible as they focus on a tech perspective.
- Lindsay, Christina. "From the shadows: Users as designers, producers, marketers, distributors, and technical support." How users matter: The co-construction of users and technology (2003): 29-50. [pdf]
- Agre, Philip E. "Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI." Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work. 1997. [pdf]
- Dourish, Paul. "What we talk about when we talk about context." Personal and ubiquitous computing 8.1 (2004): 19-30. [pdf]
- good for helping think about the interaction between methods & philosophy as it relates to tech
- Irani, Lilly, et al. "Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, 2010. [pdf]
- Shilton, K. (2013). Values Levers: Building Ethics into Design. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 38(3), 374–397. doi:10.1177/0162243912436985
- Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Materializing Morality. Science, Technology, & Human Values
- Bopp, Harmon, & Voida, 2017. Disempowered by data: Nonprofits, social enterprises, and the consequences of data-driven work. CHI 2017.
- Jesse Adams Stein. 2011. Domesticity, Gender and the 1977 Apple II Personal Computer. Design and Culture 3, 2 (July 2011), 193–216.
- Tiziana Terranova, “Ch. 1: Three Propositions on Informational Cultures.” Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press), 2004, pp. 6-27. [pdf]
- Jose van Dijck 2013 The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media
- Chapters 1 and 2 recommended for the social context of social media
- Robert Gehl, 2014. Reverse engineering social media: Software, culture, and political economy in new media capitalism.
- Kieran Healy, 2015. The performativity of networks
This was a topic part of our group was specifically interested in.
- L. Graham, 1998, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience?
- Aronova, Elena. "The politics and contexts of Soviet science studies (Naukovedenie): Soviet philosophy of science at the crossroads." Studies in East European Thought 63.3 (2011): 175. [pdf]
- This was a tough read for our group.
- Peters, Benjamin. 'Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics.' Information & Culture. Vol. 47, No. 2 (2012), pp. 145-175
- Holloway, David. 'Innovation in Science-The Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union.' Science Studies Vol. 4, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 299-337.
- Gerovitch, Slava. "InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network." History and Technology 24.4 (2008): 335-350.