Hello, world. Let's think with computers.
Hi, there. Welcome to the Thinking with Computers research blog. Pardon our dust; we’re still getting set up. This is a stab at an introduction to what we’ll be doing here.
Thinking with Computers is a SSHRC-funded project on the history of early interactive programming, especially interactive graphics. Right now, the team is me, Scott Richmond, professor of media studies at the University of Toronto; Matt Nish-Lapidus, a Toronto-based media artist and collaborator on the grant; and Breeanna Lohman, PhD candidate in the history of technology at U of T. We’re largely focused on Seymour Papert and his cadre at MIT and their work on Logo starting in the late 1960s, through the early 1980s. This focus is not exclusive; we’re thinking about other systems and their designers in this time period: Sketchpad; NLS; Smalltalk; the Dynabook; Scheme and SICP.
This is our research blog.
The big idea behind this project is that the design problems and solutions in interactive graphical computing systems were not only problems for and about the design of technical systems. They were also about the design of what we are calling computational persons, and indeed, computational personhood. Which is to say, while these technologists were designing systems, they were also designing the contexts, uses, and indeed, users of their systems.
In film theory–the field in which I was trained–especially but not only in the 1970s and 80s, thinkers started theorizing what we might call the “cinematic subject” or “the spectator.” In the jargon, cinema (or, “the cinematic apparatus”) articulates the cinematic subject as a structural effect of its technical and technological operation. In other words, and understood as a technical system, cinema positions its viewers in particular ways, and, for a while, makes its viewers adhere to a particular form of life: the spectator. A lot of time, effort, and brilliance went into understanding this spectator, what it meant, and how it worked. The big target of critique was mainstream Hollywood cinema and its political conservatism. The goal was a sketch if not a fully-realized vision of a more humane and less misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and alienating cinema.
Already in the 1970s, thinking about the cinema in this way was slightly anachronistic. Cinema was no longer the dominant medium in the countries where film-theoretical debates about the spectator took place most intensely: the US and the UK. These were decisively televisual societies by then. By now, we in overdeveloped North America no longer live in a televisual society. Rather, the lives we live now are computational through and through: networked, always on, mobile, but still screen-based. The screens are both smaller and bigger, they’re interactive, and they are everywhere.
And, to be sure, our investigation into early graphical computing systems is anachronistic. That is on purpose. The early graphical computing systems we are investigating were inquiries into how people might use the then-new medium of personal computing. Or, more accurately, they were inquiries into, and articulations of, the kind of person for whom computing could become personal.
The reason Seymour Papert and the Logo programming environment are at the centre of this inquiry is because Papert was unusually explicit about this. For him, in Mindstorms (1980) and elsewhere, Papert was explicitly interested in the ways interactive computing systems could change our thinking, our habits of mind, our ways of encountering and interacting with the world.
Logo was one attempt to develop not only a programming language and environment (Read Eval Print Loop–REPL–plus graphics), but a more encompassing computational surround. As Cynthia Solomon, one of Papert’s close collaborators put it,
Functionally, the Logo environment is made up of the following:
- a computer
- a programming language and an operating system
- a collection of computer peripherals, usually including graphics and turtles
- a collection of projects
- a meta-language–a consistent way of talking about the language, projects, etc.
- a relationship between teacher and learner
- a collection of “bridge activities” like juggling, puzzles, etc. (Stager 2021, iii)
In other words, Logo was explicitly designed from the ground up to be not only a programming language, but an arrangment of technologies, activities, affordances, languages (programming and natural), relationships, and people. Its goal was nothing short of the elaboration of a better way of learning and being in the world. (And also, institutional revolution: Papert and Solomon wanted to reinvent schools from the ground up.)
If you’re old enough to have used Logo, you’re also probably aware that it didn’t stick around much past the 1980s. I was born in 1980, and went to a school that prided itself on the most up-to-date computer education. There was one Apple IIE that ran Logo in a far off corner of the computer classroom. We mostly played The Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego on the new Apple IIGSes. If you’re not old enough to have used Logo, you may not even have heard of it. Which is just another way of knowing that it didn’t stick around much past the 1980s. And, to be sure, Logo was an explicitly utopian project.
Thinking with Computers, then, is partly a project of recovering a forgotten future of computing. That’s not to say that Logo hasn’t had a robust afterlife (e.g., in Processing and Scratch). But the research here is less about technological inheritance and afterlives, and more about the ways a group of technologists were designing a form of life.
For now, we’ve got a few different strands of inquiry, all of which will make appearances on this blog:
- Primary historical research. We are trying to tell a story about Papert and his collaborators and their institutions, to understand what they were doing and why, in their own terms.
- Conceptual and intellectual-historical research. This strand tries to situate Logo and Papert within the intellectual history of media and computing and psychology in the 20th century.
- Theoretical research. The theoretical project is to understand the ways a history of Logo can contribute to a history of the present and its contemporary forms of life.
- Technical and design research. A large part of this project is to develop contemporary technologies that embody something of the spirit and political project of Logo. This is partly to use technological affordances as a means for asking and answering critical questions. And it is also partly to understand what Papert and company were doing by doing something similar.
These strands aren’t as separate as they may seem. For example, in the technical strand, we are designing and developing our own programming environment inspired by Logo, which we are calling Ludus. But to design Ludus, we’re looking to primary documents (i.e., Papert & Solomon’s original “20 Things to Do with a Computer”) to discover the design space and goals. And we’re thinking with Papert’s way of appropriating D.W. Winnicott’s psychoanalytical concept of the “transitional object” to understand just what Logo does and how it does it.
We’re going to be working on this for the next five years or so. We’re looking forward to sharing our work with you.
Works Cited
Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. 2nd ed. Basic Books: 1993.
Papert, Seymour and Cynthia Solomon. “20 Things to Do with a Computer,” in Stager, 2021, 359–99.
Stager, Gary S., editor. 20 Things to Do with a Computer, Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert & Cynthia Solomons Seminal Work. Constructing Modern Knowledge Press: 2021.
Winnicott, DW. Playing and Reality. 2nd ed. Routledge Classics: 2005.
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