"Conceiving Ada" Group 8 Notes

(I worked with Oak and shin1068111)

1. What was your response to the film?

- we agreed, none of us particularly liked it

- did not accurately describe computer science: there were too many strange Greek characters

- hard to follow, with a lot of what seemed like irrelevant information

2. What questions does the film raise for you?

- Are information waves real?

- How did Emmy conceive/ give birth to "Ada?"

- Did this accurately describe Ada's personality and her relationship with others? (specifically men)

- What condition/disease did Ada have?

3. How can you place it within the frame of this course? How does it illustrate-or-challenge some of the ideas we have been exploring?

- intersection of gender, information, and technology

- female in 18th century without power to publish her own work

- information + meaning: she embroidered information onto her veil, the meaning was hidden by a code

- information is "mist":  it must be decoded

- John Cross the cryptographer: used encryption in his life - he kept his family a secret

4. How would you teach it, using the tools that Hayles describes?

- Digital humanities: music and poetry are traditional humanities, Ada mentions how they can be created through using the machine

- data streams: we should go with the flow of the movie, we need to forget meaning

- do not get bogged down by detail, or we will miss the big picture

- not replicating existing paradigms: let the flow of data be its own paradigm, the film was not quite sci fi, not quite biographical

- not every aspect of the movie was important

- cartographic imagination: flow of movie was all over the place, no clear data stream, yet all connected

- these connections make their own data stream