Working Paper Series: Medien der Kooperation

This Working Paper Series is edited by the Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation and promotes inter- and transdisciplinary media research. The series provides an avenue for rapid publication and dissemination of ongoing research located at or associated with the CRC. The purpose of the Working Paper Series is to circulate in-progress research or preprints to the wider research community beyond the CRC. Please contact the authors if you have any questions or comments. The Working Papers are accessible via the CRC website, the OPUS server, here or in a limited print edition. Orders and contact via website. Publication of the series is funded by the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 262513311.

Browsing Working Paper Series: Medien der Kooperation by Author "Haigh, Thomas"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Book
    Colossus: The Missing Manual
    Priestley, Mark; Haigh, Thomas (2019)
    There has until now been no comprehensive, convenient, and reliable description of the actual capabilities of the Colossus codebreaking machines used at Bletchley Park during World War II, the way they were used, and the jobs they were applied to. This gap in the literature has led to a lack of understanding of the machines’ functionality and hence to exaggerated claims about their capabilities. In this report we remove the Colossi as far as possible from their cryptanalytical context and consider them simply as computational devices. We give an architectural description of the whole family of related machines, including the initial model known as “Heath Robinson”, and a functional description of the major capabilities of the second and final Colossus design. We include detailed examples of how the machines would have been set up to perform a range of typical tasks, and conclude with a discussion of their versatility, examining in particular the question of how useful they would have been once the war had ended. We present several examples of actual Colossus configurations and the historical output they produced, illustrating the cooperation between figures typed automatically by Colossus and text and annotations added by the human operator.
  • Book
    Defining Digitalities I: What’s Digital about Digits?
    Haigh, Thomas (2023)
    Modern discourses emphasizes electronic immateriality as the defining feature of digital technology. The idea that digits might be digital when punched onto cards, or even written on a piece of pa- per, is no longer intuitive. Yet by reconstructing the context in which the categories of digital and analog were first distinguished histori- cally in the 1940s, I argue that the concept of digitality is rooted in the mechanical representation of digits in early computers, which con- temporary observers immediately recognized was shared with earlier technologies such as telephone switching systems, punched cards, and calculating devices. Digitality is not a feature of an object itself, but of the way that object is read (whether by human or by machine) as encoding symbols chosen from a finite set. In conclusion, digitality is constituted through reading practices.
  • Book
    Defining Digitalities II: What’s Digital About Digital Communication?
    Haigh, Thomas; Gießmann, Sebastian (2023)
    Although the distinction between digital and analog was first made in the context of automatic computers, the concepts were quickly broadened to apply to media and communication systems of all kinds. This working paper continues work on both fronts by looking at the his- torical broadening of the concept of digitality to include non-numerical systems of representation such as those used to encode text and pic- tures. This conception underlies the ability of computers to deal with things other than numbers, but it has its roots in communications the- ory, most famously in the work of Claude Shannon. In parallel with our historical description of the emergence of non-numerical conceptions of digitality we broaden our analytical treatment of digitality to en- compass more historical technologies and reading practices: not only adding machines and punched cards, but also musical boxes, weaving systems, movable type, and even alphabets and hand gestures.
  • Book
    Defining Digitalities III: What’s Digital About Digital Media?
    Haigh, Thomas; Gießmann, Sebastian (2023)
    In this working paper we explore an alternative thread in the early development of media and medium as concepts: the origins of the idea of the storage medium in digital computing practices and communities of the 1940s and 1950s. While such practices were obscure at the time, they laid the technological foundation for today’s range of digital media. We discuss digitality as a feature of the practices used to read and write symbols from a medium, not a physical property of the medium itself. We then move on to a discussion of the alphabet as itself digital, grounded in the work of Nelson Goodman. Engaging with the contributions of Matthew Kirschenbaum, we explore the limited interchangeability of representations between different encodings of the same symbols, connecting the purported immateriality of digitality to this actual fungibility of material representations.
  • Book
    Finding a Story for the History of Computing
    Haigh, Thomas (2018)
    Thomas Haigh is working with Paul Ceruzzi of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., on an expanded and completely reorganized version of Ceruzzi’s classic monograph A History of Modern Computing. Haigh discusses the challenges involved in producing a one volume history of a uniquely flexible technology. Since the first edition of the book was published twenty years ago our sense of what the computer is for has shifted utterly, to encompass media consumption, personal communication, and shopping as well as the traditional activities of business administration and scientific number crunching. To reflect this, Ceruzzi and Haigh are adopting a new structure, in which each chapter of the book tells the story of how “the computer” becomes something different through its interaction with a particular set of users and applications. Haigh connects this structure to the work of historian Michael S. Mahoney, and his discussion of the “Histories of Computing(s).” He ponders the particular difficulty of avoiding a simplistic narrative of historical progress, often called a “whig history,” in summarizing the evolution of a technology whose spectacular technical improvement has come to define our idea of modernity. Haigh also discusses Ceruzzi’s text in relation to other comprehensive histories of computing, the production process of the new edition, and some of the editorial choices involved in a project of this kind.