Ada Lovelace, Romantic from the Future: An Interview with Roger Whitson, Part I

This interview with Roger Whitson, Associate Professor of English at Washington State University, is one of three posts celebrating Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852). Daughter of Lord and Lady Byron and regarded by many as the first computer programmer, these posts explore the current and future role of Ada Lovelace in literary studies and the classroom. The series is curated by Aaron Ottinger for the Keats-Shelley Association of America. AO: You’re working on a project about media and time in the nineteenth century. Does Ada Lovelace have a role to play in such a history?RW: First of all, thank you for interviewing me and being interested in my work! I’m really happy that Ada Lovelace is getting more attention, because her role in computer history has been debated for some time, and for reasons that I feel are pretty reflective of how women are too often treated by the computer industry. As an example, Allan Bromley argues that the notion of Lovelace as the first computer programmer is a “romantically appealing image [...] without foundation.”[1] And many other computer history scholars note that she had a high opinion of her own abilities that was not reflected in the work she actually produced. There is quite a bit of shade thrown in Lady Lovelace’s direction.AO: It’s a bit of a silly position on the part of Lovelace’s critics, because it’s not like other mathematicians’ ideas simply came out of nowhere.RW: Precisely, because collaboration is pretty essential in both mathematics and science, and yet who gets credit for such work is overwhelmingly a product of power and privilege. Ada Lovelace collaborated for some time with Charles Babbage before the publication of her program. It is also true that Babbage wrote some programs for the analytical engine before Lovelace’s program was published. But Babbage and Lovelace were constantly passing ideas between each other. So, it is clear to me that Lovelace has suffered from the misogyny that continues to impact women working in science and technology. Ashley Reed has said that Silicon Valley espouses “a gendered hierarchy between productive, marketable, male-associated labor and reproductive, amateur, female-associated labor.”[2] So, typically, and much like her mentor Mary Somerville, Lovelace is consigned to being merely a popularizer of male ideas rather than a programmer and theorist in her own right.For me, this controversy over labor brings up many issues that are also being addressed by the field of media archaeology, which is the major theoretical lens where I and my coauthors Crystal Lake, Andrew Burkett, and Richard Menke are using to explore media time in Deep Time of the Nineteenth Century. For one, media archaeologists like Siegfried Zielinski explicitly resist historical narratives of technological progress that emphasize certain (usually white and male) innovators over the assemblages of people, animals, materials, code, and ecologies making possible the construction and disposal of certain devices. Of course, Apple has no interest in where its iMacs from 2001 went after people disposed of them or in the thousands to millions of years it takes for their parts to decompose. But people in the Congo and in rural provinces in China, two major places where the U.S. exports 20 to 50 million tons of e-waste per year, probably have a different opinion of what constitutes the history of technology because they have to deal with its effects on a daily basis.AO: Indeed, media theory and ecocriticism seem to have converged, and for good reason given how long it takes plastic to decompose. Sean Cubitt’s Finite Media (2016) comes to my mind. But how does Ada Lovelace fit into all of this?RW: Yes! Cubitt’s work is very good on this issue. More pertinent to my own work on Ada Lovelace is Wolfgang Ernst’s research into time-criticality. Time-criticality is the delineation and processing of time by computational media.[3] This idea is crucial to my work on Lovelace because she was the first person to theorize the use of computational media to simulate other media. Her example was electronically-produced music. She said that if we could simply understand the numerical relationship between notes, we could not just measure them but recreate the music being analyzed — because music for her is simply that mathematical relationship between notes.We tend to think of computers as doing all of these magical things, but in reality all they are doing is manipulating electricity in extremely small, microtemporal increments. Temporality is key to a computer’s timing mechanism. It doesn’t just crunch numbers but does so in a certain time to create the effects that we experience in the form of images or music. Lovelace understood that, if we produced a simulation of something that was close enough to the original to be indistinguishable from it, we could use computers for a variety of applications. That sense of general computing is very different from how Babbage understood mathematics, as an ultimate expression of reality in a neo-Platonic or even Pythagorean sense. I call Lovelace’s understanding of simulation a media theory, because simulation presupposes a difference between an original and a simulation. And this difference structures our sense of computing, even if we cannot physiologically detect that difference. Lovelace understood that even if we couldn’t tell the difference between music played by a human and music composed by the analytical engine, a simulation is still a simulation. It’s that play or mediation between a difference existing and us not being able to tell the difference that made her truly able to grasp the notion of computer programming. It’s no wonder that Alan Turing cited Ada Lovelace when theorizing his “imitation game” or Turing Test, even though they came to different conclusion about whether computers can think.Note: For the second half of this interview, check back with the K-SAA Blog tomorrow, November 28, 2018.[1] Allan Bromley. “Difference and Analytical Engines.” Computing Before Computers. Ed. William Aspray. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1990, 88-9.[2] Ashley Reed. “Craft and Care: The Maker Movement, Catherine Blake, and the Digital Humanities.” Essays in Romanticism. 23.1 (2016), 29.[3] See Wolfgang Ernst’s Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, as well as his Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Minnesota: U Minnesota Press, 2012.