Abstract: Digital technology — with AI being the latest example — promises a form of knowledge that is either the product of an objective machine or the distillation of a collective human wisdom. Either way, this knowledge is presented as a „gaze from nowhere,“ in the words of theorist Donna Haraway. Feminist studies of science, technology, and gender have argued for the importance of situating knowledge within bodies and within cultures, so that we may acknowledge the limitations of our viewpoint and take responsibility for what we know. In this talk I examine several historical examples of how gender as a cultural construct has shaped perceptions of expertise in computing, drawing on my study of women’s experiences in the US and UK in the second half of the 20th century. I then explore how recent critiques such as „data feminism“ raise epistemological and ethical issues around the use of digital technologies to produce facts. In particular, I ask how computer-generated knowledge claims can be evaluated in terms of situatedness, intentionality, and accountability.
Biography: Janet Abbate is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech, USA. Her research focuses on the history, culture, and politics of computing and the Internet. She is the author of Inventing the Internet (1999) and Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (2012) and co-editor with Stephanie Dick of Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society (2022).
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