Women in Engineering: Gender & Computing

February 20, 2009     #media

This past evening I gave a talk for engineering week on women in information technology. Feminizing the field of computer science is some coverage of the event from the Daily Pennsylvanian.

Oral History with Peter Wegner

January 20, 2009     #publications

Oral history interview with Peter Wegner, emeritus professor of computer science at Brown University, and Fellow of the ACM.

SAS Frontiers Magazine

December 12, 2008     #media

The current issue of School of Arts & Science Frontiers magazine features a review of my recent work on the Internet and American commerce.

The article is written by B. Davin Stengel, and is called Doctors Without Modems? Technology Historian Nathan Ensmenger checks the pulse of the e-health revolution.

Open Source Teaching

December 12, 2008     #media

The Open Source Teaching Project represents an attempt to use Web 2.0 technologies and social networking to “create freely interactive media platforms which integrate academic and social content focused on critical thinking, college, and careers.”

Listen here to my interview with OST, where I discuss such diverse topics as “what is the history of technology,” “choices and technology,” “the problems with digital media,” and “doing research as an undergradute.”

It was a pleasure working with the OST. I regularly teach about open source projects, and have written a little about the lessons of open source for historians, but this is my first real open-source project.

Lectronic Lovin

November 07, 2008     #media

This past year my cyberculture seminar happened to meet on Valentine’s day, and so we did a special session on online dating. One of the things to come out of that was an interview with a reporter from the Daily Pennsylvanian for its 34th Street Magazine. Here is her article entitled “Love in the Time of Facebook.” Good stuff.

Society for the History of Technology

October 22, 2008     #research

At the recent Society for the History of Technology conference, held this year in Lisbon, I presented a paper called “Fixing things that can never be broken: Software maintenance as heterogeneous engineering.” At some point in the near future I hope to transform this short essay into a full-length paper. For the time being, here is the conference version.