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March 24, 2010
Eden Medina Historian of Technology - ALD10 post
For my Ada Lovelace Day 2010 post I would like to call attention to the work of Eden Medina, who I found in true internet fashion, by following a link which led to a link which led to a treasure. Eden Medina is an historian of technology and its impact on society. She has written her doctoral dissertation on – and has a book under contract covering – the Cybersyn project of Chile. Her research moves the center of gravity in the conversations about where technological innovation occurs, and under what circumstances. This is heady and powerful stuff. I want to learn more about her research, I admire the depth and breadth that she covers. I admire that she is an electrical engineer with deeply humanistic concerns. She is an historian with strong technological chops. I think she is an appropriate figure for Ada Lovelace Day.
From Eden Medina's profile at the University of Indiana, where she teaches:
Eden Medina is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her Ph.D. in 2005 from the MIT Doctoral Program in the History and Social Studies of Science and Technology and holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Women’s Studies from Princeton University.
Medina's research uses technology as a means to understand historical processes. Her most recent work addressed the history of information technologies in Latin America and the role these technologies played in creating new forms of governance and the advancement of state ideological projects. More generally, her research contributes to scholarship in the history of technology, Latin American history, and the growing field of social informatics and combines these fields in her writings and teaching.
Her current book manuscript Cybernetic Socialism tells the history of the Chilean Cybersyn Project, an early computer network designed to regulate Chile's economic transition to socialism during the government of Salvador Allende.
Medina has received grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. In 2007 she received the IEEE Life Members' Prize in Electrical History. She is also the recipient of a 2007-2008 Scholar's Award from the National Science Foundation.
Eden Medina has lectured at Harvard's Berkman Center for Cyber Law for which there is video available online.
Find out more about Ada Lovelace Day
Search Twitter and Facebook for hash tags #ALD10, #ALD2010, Ada Lovelace Day 2010
Finding Ada is the homepage for the celebration.
A nice animation about the life of Ada Lovelace can be found at BrainPop.com.
Posted by Rafael Fajardo at March 24, 2010 12:00 AM