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"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