Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

rubikscube's picture

"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

 

Reply

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
3 + 5 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.