Forthcoming or In Progress:

• Defining Digitalities. A book project I'm leading with Valérie Schafer of the University of Luxembourg's Center for Contemporary and Digital History. A hybrid of a coauthored book and edited volume, it is the first broad based effort to historicize the concept of digitality. The international and interdisciplinary lineup of contributors include Jacob Gaboury, Ron Kline, Elizabeth Petrick, Theodora Vardouli, Gerardo Con Diaz, Till Heilman, Birgit Schneider, Bernhard Rieder, Frederic Clavert and Nathan Ensmenger. Versions of the first three chapters, which I wrote with Sebastian Giessmann, have been published as working papers by Siegen University's Media of Cooperation project. 
• "IBM in the Kidnapped West." The third part in my series on IBM in Post War Europe with Petri Paju, this one looks at the role of Habsburg nobility in facilitating IBM's trade across the Iron Curtain from the 1950s to the 1970s.
• Artificial Intelligence: The History of a Brand. The central thread of this short book is the ongoing tension between AI as, on the one hand, an important subfield of computer science with all the hallmarks of a discipline and, on the other, as a marketing brand applied arbitrarily to a changing set of technologies most of which conspicuously failed to deliver on the promises made for them. 

Recently ​Published:

• "Between the Booms: AI in Winter," Communications of the ACM 67:11 (November 2024):18-23. The tag line "after people stopped caring, AI got much more interesting" captures my thoughts about the 1990s as an interesting and largely neglected chapter in the history of AI, in which new approaches such as artificial life, embodied intelligence, statistical parsing and Bayesian belief networks moved into the forefront of a discipline attempt to move on from the collapse of the 1980s boom. (Online at ACM)
• "Writing the Big Story," in William Aspray (ed.) Writing Computer and Information History: Approaches, Reflections, and Connections, Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming 2024. A reflective essay about the choices and tradeoffs we made writing A New History of Modern Computing, the book's reception, and the current state of the history of computing. (Preprint online)
• "How the AI Boom Went Bust," Communications of the ACM 67:2 (February 2024):22-26. In part 3 of the series I look at the role of textbooks in centering AI on symbolic approaches, the new focus on knowledge representation that took hold in the 1970s and the AI boom that developed around expert systems. When faith began to crumble in the mid-1980s this led to what had been warned of a few years earlier as a risk: the "AI Winter." (Online at ACM).
• "There Was No 'First AI Winter'," Communications of the ACM 66:12 (December 2023):35-39. Continuing the AI history series, I look at the development of the field in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing particularly on the field's dependence on military funding and the vulnurabilities this created to the whims of funding agencies. Conventional wisdom suggests that funding cuts in the early 1970s led to a slump of interest in AI, which it retrospect has been dubbed an "AI Winter", but text analysis and membership figures for the main interest group in the area suggest instead that the AI community continued to grow throughout the decade. (Online at ACM)
• "Defining Digitalities I: What's Digital About Digits?" Siegen: Universität Siegen 2023. First in a trilogy of working papers from the upcoming Defining Digitalities project, this one looks at the origins of the concept of digitality in the 1940s around the representation of digits. (online at Siegen).
• "Defining Digitalities II: What's Digital About Digital Communication?" Siegen: Universität Siegen 2023 (with Sebastian Giessmann). The second part in the series explores the extension of the concept of digitality from digits to symbolic coding systems in general, which we ground in Claude Shannon's work on a general theory of digital communication.  (online at Siegen)
• "Defining Digitalities III: What's Digital About Digital Media" Siegen: Universität Siegen 2023 (with Sebastian Giessmann). The concept of digitality was soon applied by computer engineers to machine readable data storage. We look at this broadening of the concept from communication to storage media, which underlies the modern sense of digital immateriality because digital representations can be automatically transcribed from one interchangable representation to another.  (online at Siegen)
• Conjoined Twins: Artificial Intelligence and the Invention of Computer Science," Communications of the ACM 66:6 (June, 2023):33-37. First in a series on the history of AI, taking a novel approach by situating early AI as a central part of the emerging field of computer science and as a reaction bolder cybernetic claims of computers as machines than inherently engage in thinking. (Online at ACM)
• "Becoming Universal," Communications of the ACM 65:2 (February, 2022):25-30. Tries to explain some of the key ideas in A New History of Modern Computing, and of the scholarly literature on which it draws, to an audience of computer scientists. (online at ACM) (online locally) 
• "Beyond Fake News: Learning from Information Literacy Programs in Ukraine" in Libraries and the Global Retreat from Democracy, Natalie Greene Taylor, Karen Kettnich, Ursula Gorham, and Paul T. Jaeger (eds.) (Emerald, 2021 with Maria Haigh, Maryna Dorosh & Tetiana Matychak): 163-182.
• A New History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2021 -- with Paul Ceruzzi). A new book derived from Paul Ceruzzi's classic A History of Modern Computing, the most widely cited overview history of computing. I can't say much about the project in one paragraph, but have described in in detail in my Siegen University working paper "Finding a Story for the History of Computing." (Details at MIT Press) (Buy at Amazon)
• "Women's Lives in Code," Communications of the ACM 64:9 (September, 2021):28-42. The final part of my trilogy on depictions of IT work, looking at Ellen Ullman's wonderful memoir Close to the Machine and at the TV show "Halt and Catch Fire." (online at ACM) (online locally)
• "When Hackers Were Heroes," Communications of the ACM 64:4 (April, 2021): 28-34. The second installment of the series, this one  considers Steven Levy’s 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The book is the source of the much-quoted “hacker ethic” but it’s richer, stranger, and more deeply rooted in its time than you might expect if all you’ve seen is the bullet point version. (online at ACM) (online locally)
• "The Immortal Soul of an Old Machine," Communications of the ACM 64:1 (January, 2021): 32-37. The first in a series of three articles exploring classic representations of IT work. This one was inspired by the 40th anniversary of the publication of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine. It's a book that developers and historians both continue to find fascinating, as a blending of literary craft and engineering practice. My aim is to take the book apart to see how it works and discover what it can tell us about how tech work has changed in four decades. (online at ACM) (online locally)
• "Contextualizing Colossus,” Technology & Culture 61:3 (July, 2020):871:900 (with Mark Priestley). The second of our major articles about Colossus, Our objective was to reinterpret Colossus as part of the history of the Post Office's Dollis Hill research center, where it was designed and built, rather than of the Bletchley Park code breaking facility where it was used. I think we accomplish that, although the available sources are much richer on the Bletchley Park side so the stories remain more entagled than I'd anticipated. Our final framing is one of institutional partnership and organizational capabilities, versus the focus on lone genius and defiance of bureaucracy in the existing literature on Colossus. More specifically, we show that Bletchley Park knew of and supported Colossus during its development. The widely repeated stories that its leaders resisted the introduction of electronics and were shocked by the arrival of the machine turn out to be based on a misreading of sources related to Tommy Flowers' involvement with entirely separate projects there.(preprint online locally) (online at Project Muse) 
• "Fighting and Framing Fake News," The Sage Handbook of Propaganda, Paul Baines, Nicholas O'Shaughnessy & Nancy Snow (eds.) (Springer, 2020): 305-324. (with Maria Haigh) Following our earlier work on StopFake we were invited to contribute something on topic of combatting fake news. The eventual chapter goes broader and deeper, beginning with an attempt to define "fake news" in a way influenced by the STS literature, focused on the social processes that produce it rather than its truth value. We then survey different ways in which fake news has been framed, and different weapons proposed to fight it with. The appropriate choice of weapon is highly dependent on one's conceptualization of the problem, though approaches based on information literacy are currently ascendant. (preprint online locally)
• "Assembling a History for Formal Methods: A Personal Perspective," Formal Aspects of Computing 31 (2019):663-674. My response to an invitation to contribute something for a historical issue of a technical journal. One problem: I had not studied the history of formal methods. So instead I triangulated from three things I did feel comfortable with: the prehistory of formal methods in the story of Algol, the software crisis, and the IFIP working group on programming methodologies; my training in formal methods in the early 1990s, and my subsequent grounding in the history of computing literature. The result raises more questions than answers. (preprint online locally) (online at Springer)
• "Von Neumann Thought Turing's Universal Machine Was 'Simple and Neat' But That Didn't Tell Him How to Design a Computer." Communications of the ACM 63:1 (January 2020):26-32 (with Mark Priestley). One of the more technical of my "historical reflections" for ACM, this one presents evidence discovered by my collaborator Mark Priestley that for the first time establishes that John von Neumann had read Turing's classic 1936 paper by the time he was working to define modern computer architecture in 1945-6. We argue  that he was perhaps the first to identify the "universal machine" as an important idea in its own right, but comparing its treatment here with his other writings of the period suggests that he did not consider it directly in devising the architectures of real computers.  (online at ACM) (online locally)
• “Information Literacy vs. Fake News: The Case of Ukraine.” Open Information Science Journal 3:1 (January 2019): 154-165. with Maria Haigh and Tetiana Matychak). Another publication on fake news, this one looking specifically at measures taken in Ukraine where Russia's 2014 disinformation offensive triggered an early and concerted set of efforts to build defenses.(online at De Gruyter)
• "Colossus the Missing Manual." Medien der Kooperation working paper series 10 (Siegen Germany, 2019) (with Mark Priestley) Unlike ENIAC, Colossus was not delivered with a manual. This has led to some confusion about what the machine could do and a lack of a reference source where its controls and functioning were clearly described. What seemed like an easy, informal project finished up producing a well-illustrated and professional looking little book including several sample configurations taken from archival sources. Its target audience is rather limited, though given the Colossus reconstruction at Bletchley Park and the "Virtual Colossus" now available online the "manual" is not quite as useless as it might appear. (online at Siegen University)
• Exploring the Early Digital (editor), Springer, 2019. Based on a workshop I organized in 2017, this edited volume brings together some of the most celebrated scholars from the history of computing community. Our goals is to move beyond the traditional frames of "computing" and "the computer" to look more broadly and the historical development of digital devices and platforms. (Book website:early.digital) (online at Springer)
• “The Media of Programming,” in Thomas Haigh, ed., Exploring the Early Digital (Springer, 2019): 135-158. (with Mark Priestley) Extending the work I did with Mark Priestley on ENIAC and Colossus, and our CACM piece "Where Code Comes From" we dig in to look at the representations and media used to encode instructions in early computers and the relationship of these media to the affordances the machines provided to their users. As the paper developed, its main contribution is an in-depth look at the way von Neumann and his associates conceptualized memory in their design for EDVAC, particularly the origins of the now taken for granted idea of "memory addresses" and its early relationship both to the temporal cycles that characterized delay line memory and the spatial metaphor of numbers living in houses on a street that's naturalized in the concept of an address. (online at Springer) (preprint online locally)
• “Hey Google, What’s a Moonshot? How Silicon Valley Mocks Apollo.” Communications of the ACM 62:1 (January 2019): 24-30. ( Make the case that Google has misappropriated "moonshot" for projects hundreds of times less ambitious than the Apollo program and following an entirely different, incremental and profit driven, model of innovation. (online at ACM) (online locally)
• “Colossus and Programmability,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:4 (Oct-Dec, 2018): 5-27. (with Mark Priestley) Winner of the IEEE Finn Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. Colossus occupies a weird position in the history of computing literature: increasingly hyped in Britain and heralded by its boosters as the first programmable computer while politely ignored in most overview histories of computing. We set out to document its programming capabilities and method, which were not clearly described in the existing literature, and thus incorporate it into the broader history of programming and computer architecture. What we discovered was that Colossus wasn't programmable or a computer, but to reach that conclusion we first had to figure out what "programmable" even means when talking about the 1940s. We argue that rescuing Colossus from the discourse about the "first [whatever] computer" into which is has been shoehorned will let us appreciate it on its own terms as part of the history of telecommunications technology and digital electronics. (online at IEEE) (preprint online locally)
•  “Finding a Story for the History of Computing.” Medien der Kooperation working paper series 3 (Siegen Germany, 2018). This has roughly the same relationship to my work with Paul Ceruzzi on the new History of Modern Computing that a "making of" bonus feature does to a movie on DVD. I describe our objectives, the inherent challenges in producing a one volume history of the modern computer that takes users seriously, and the new narrative structure we adopted as a response. In the new book chapters often run in parallel, each telling the story of how "the computer becomes" something new. (online at Siegen)
• "Stopping Fake News: The Work Practices of Peer-to-Peer Counter Propoganda."Journalism Studies 19:14 (2018): 2062-87 (with Maria Haigh and Nadine Kozak). A look at StopFake, which at the time of the study was an all-volunteer Ukrainian organization trying to fight the spread of fake news by media and troll groups affiliated with the Russian state. This paper comes from an event organized by the UWM Social Studies of Information Research Group during my time as chair. When we started work in 2015 the topic of state sponsored 'fake news" seemed rather obscure, but recent events have helped to make it startlingly relevant well beyond the Ukrainian context. (preprint online locally) (online at Taylor & Francis)
• "IBM's Tiny Peripheral: Finland and the Tensions of Transnationality." Business History Review 92:1 (Spring 2018):3-28 (with Petri Paju). A sequel to our prize winning paper "IBM Rebuilds Europe," this one focuses on the history of IBM in Finland. We argue that the operations of this national subsidiary can only be understood as part of a set of networks of transnational exchange, in which partipants negotiated national, regional, European, and global aspects of their identities within their relationship to IBM. (online at Cambridge)
• ​“Thomas Harold ‘Tommy’ Flowers: Creator of Colossus,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 40:1 (Jan-Mar 2018): 72-82. Another publication from my project on the history of Colossus. As far as I know this is the most comprehensive biographical profile of Flowers yet produced, pulling together information on his early life and post-War career as well as his wartime achievements. There aren't any huge surprises, but it does fix some errors in previous profiles (such as his year of graduation) by going back to primary sources, and a lot of the information I tracked down was previously burried in oral history recordings or obscure newsletters. (online at IEEE)
• "Defining American Greatness: IBM from Watson to Trump." Communications of the ACM 70:1 (January 2018): 32-37. Like Donald Trump, Thomas Watson Sr. and the empire he built were obsessed with the idea of "greatness." However they defined it in quite different ways. The article pulls together aspects of my work on the history of IBM within the broader history of capitalism in the US, approaching the phenomenon of Trumpism from an unexpected but revealing direction. (online at ACM)