Patricia Galloway

Personal Computers, Microhistory, and Shared Authority: Documenting the Inventor–Early Adopter Dialectic

Documenting the history of computers is complex because it requires not only documents but hardware, software, people, memories, and practice, together with an understanding of the information ecology that they constitute. An example from the authors own history with personal computers explores how these kinds of evidence are generated and how they might be gathered into archives for historical research.

Model studies in computer seriation

Abstract A computer model is described which generates artificial incidence matrices, with statistical properties similar to those of a Merovingian cemetery, but with a known chronological order. These matrices are used to test the effectiveness of various seriation procedures. Both permutation search and multi-dimensional scaling methods are investigated. The effects of various similarity matrix transformations are also discussed.

Retrocomputing, Archival Research, and Digital Heritage Preservation: A Computer Museum and iSchool Collaboration

This article discusses the potential contributions of lay members of the public to the dialogue around the data/information/knowledge life-cycle in a community technology museum, the Goodwill Computer Museum in Austin, Texas. Through an examination of the museums collaboration with the University of Texas School of Information, the article addresses the situation that arises when a museum is created by non(museum)-professionals who control considerable expertise in the subject field, and explores how the presence and collaboration of volunteers allows the museum to serve as a laboratory setting for the participation of academic researchers in the field of digital heritage preservation.

From Archival Management to Archival Enterprise to the Information Domain: David Gracy and the Development of Archival Education at the University of Texas

David B. Gracy II is very well known for his advocacy for archives and the study of archives, an enthusiasm that he has been communicating to students from the 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. He has been involved during his career with most initiatives having to do with furthering archival education through both continuing education for working archivists and, at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), crafting a full program of postgraduate archival and preservation education. In this article I discuss the development of a discourse about and cadre for archival education in the United States, counterpointed by developments at UT from the perspective of Gracy’s career as it intersected with the social worlds of state, local, and national archives and archivists; national postsecondary education for archivists; and the national professional association of archivists.

Playpens for Mind Children: Continuities in the Practice of Programming

Like most activities, the practice of computer programming involves real people trying to get their work done, and it has a complicated, if relatively short, history in its modern manifestation. This article addresses some of the early computer science discussions of programming and theories about how it should proceed. The article closes with a discussion of the more recent turn to so-called agile methods, demonstrating that some of the problems and practices of computer programming demonstrate a remarkable continuity over forty years in spite of much-promoted new approaches and changes in the computing environment.

Archiving Digital Objects as Maintenance: Reading a Rosetta Machine

Abstract: Archiving digital objects consists of maintenance and conservation: the job of arresting a cultural object in time, maintaining it as closely as possible in the state in which it was created. Hardware and software provide the context in which digital objects are created, and other hardware and software provide the context in which they must be maintained, but practitioners of digital preservation are only now beginning to move seriously into the area of deciding how to perform digital objects for users. In this paper I discuss a personal effort at stopping time for hardware and what it has taught me about approaching construction of preservable platforms that can replicate the context of creation for digital objects. I will also discuss what we lose when we decide to discard environment in favor of some generalized idea of content.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez (review)

are now senior scholars, adds to the volume’s profile rather than detracts from it. Furthermore, the problem of timeliness in this field is a product of its vibrancy and vitality; specialists are likely to perceive the matter from this angle and understand that it is a good problem to have. Finally, a small but important aspect of the challenge of timeliness in volumes such as this is that of maps; in Mesoamerica, they are clear and plentiful (25 in all), and should be useful for many decades. MacLeod, above all, but also Adams and the contributing authors, are to be congratulated for creating a volume that rises to the challenges of coherence and timeliness, that functions effectively as a reference work, that serves as a student resource (ranging from graduate students exploring dissertation topics to upperlevel undergraduates researching term papers), and that all scholars of Mesoamerica will wish to possess.

Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe

When the conquistadors arrived in Florida in the early sixteenth century, as many as 350,000 native Americans lived in the territory. For more than twelve centuries their ancestors had resided there, fishing, hunting, gathering wild plants, and sometimes cultivating crops. Two and a half centuries later, Floridas Indians were gone. Focusing on those native peoples and their interactions with Spanish and French explorers and colonists, Jerald Milanich describes this massive cultural change. Using information gathered from archaeological excavations and from the interpretation of historical documents left behind by the colonial powers, he explains where the native groups came from, where they lived, and what happened to them. He closes with the tragic disappearance of the original inhabitants in the eighteenth century and the first appearance of the ancestors of Floridas present Native Americans.