Slides #

In this presentation, I would like to share with you an ongoing research reflection that is focused on the notion of “petites mains”.

I choose to stick with the French expression, because it is difficult to translate as it is in English: small or little hands would not convey the meaning of the French formula. Actually, maybe a term that would be closer is amanuensis, or textual assistant, but I’m afraid it’s mainly a matter of textual environments, although les petites mains seem to be able to reach beyond that.

But I will of course and first of all, explain what I understand of the petites mains.

The “petites mains” referred in the 19th century to a labor grade in sewing industry :

In clothing workshops, the first hands, les premières mains, assigned meticulous and repetitive tasks to the petites mains that were apprentice sewer, exclusively women apprentice.

Today, we are not all in France dressmakers or sewers, but we still use this common expression to qualify all activities that are hand-made, tasks that require as much time as energy.

And that’s maybe one origin of the main problem : So ambiguous as the French language can be, petite in petite main reminds us that these hands must be discreet, efficient, not so much visible, careful to the slightest bit of detail, but above all that these hands are minor in size and significance on the final work.

For the Humanities and Social Sciences, the “petites mains” duties (mainly edition) are not considered as important for the knowledge emergence and production. The petites mains’ actions, involving technique and know-how expertise, only represent a low weight on the knowledge scale. Thinking, producing thinking is not, does not emerge from doing.

For the last ten years or so, there has been a peculiar concern in studies around the behind-the-scenes of science, and the term “petite main” has become as much a way to express a revalorization work as a statement. Among all the studies that can be valuable sources to my project, I cannot quote all of them, and if I don’t cite you, don’t blame me, I’ll be happy to read your research and very open to other reading suggestions for a work that is much still in progress.

And here I should mention one of our main origin myth, the project that is presented as the beginning of Digital Humanities.

The Index Thomisticus project was a Father Busas project to put into a form that was machine-readable the work of Thomas Aquinas. It’s not just an exemple of collaboration between a man of science and a powerful company that was IBM, or a collaboration between religion and technology, or just a promising gathering of whites men, it’s although a great example of a scientific pattern, a model case for the myth of the almost alone scholar with a crucial but for a long time neglected backstage.

Most fields cannot point to a single progenitor, much less a divine one, but humanities computing has Father Busa.

It is neither the IBM men nor Father Busa and his faith that have concretely set the works of Thomas Aquinas into punchcards.

Several outstanding researchers, such as Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan and Steven Jones, have done extensive research into the archives and the political and social context of the project’s development, not only to expose the project from the inside, but also to deconstruct the myth of the founding father and the lone scholar.

If you are interested in these research, I put a link to a zotero library at the end.

As recalled by the fantastic work of Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, these are workers, mostly women, 65 young workers, who were trained in a keyboard typography school (founded by Busa in Milan) or who had already worked with Busa on another project.

Nyhan’s work specificly brings back into view the ghostly workers who haunt the project’s archive material, the unidentified women working at punch card machines and looking down at their controls.

Her researchs not only worked to restore the importance and impact of the keypunch operators work on the project, but have also tried to better understand their personal experience, and whether the project have really benefited them.

With Danila Cairati who was Busa’s final secretary and Marco Passarotti (Busa’s former student) she conducted interviews with women who could be identified in 2014 two thousand fourteen in Italy. What mostly stands out is that women represented at the time a low-cost and low-skilled ressource of work. They were left without the opportunity to move up to a higher position than punchcard operator, and most of them had not even been informed of the final aim of the project.

That being said, does the fact that female workers encoded the punchcards mean that the project is no longer Father Busa’s?

While the punched card operators relied on the input of the scholars to guide the transposition of the text from container to container, so the scholars relied on the keypunch operators to reify the Index Thomisticus and related texts as scalable, computable artefacts. One could not properly do their work without the other; both played fundamental roles in the process of data capture and dataset elaboration.

It’s not a matter of putting Busa on post-mortem trial or removing him from the project, it is a concern to have better understanding of a model that the Index Thomisticus embodies for the culture of the digital humanities.

The myth of the lone scholar, which Busa himself helped to build, disguises the collaborative dimension of the project. But this collaboration was not without a sexist hierarchy.

Nyhan cites an event that illustrates the division of tasks not according to skill but according to gender: the “petites mains” worked under the supervision of a “première main”, Livia Canestraro, one of the most important keypunch women on the project. In the ’60s, Father Busa tried to replace Livia Canestraro with a lesser-trained man. This apparently caused a revolt that didn’t prevent the replacement.

The fact that such a myth has to be deconstructed in order to escape also from an abstraction model and a leading masculinity is for my research an inspiring case. What surprises me even more is that the Busa archive, that collects a large part of the documentation on the project, began in 2009 (two thousand nine) under Father Busa’s supervision, and was continued after his death in 2011, and so these ghosts of the project were there : the women on the photographs are neither out of focus nor hidden. The fact that they are not seen is an optical and epistemological problem. We don’t see them because the “petites mains” have, in the dominant cultural model, no visibility, that is no ability to be seen.

The patriarchal logic of the myth continues in many projects kept in mind by the Digital humanities and validates the importance of the document (of scientific research more than of creative exploration as pointed out by McPherson). Here an example of another important myth of man epistemology and master-narration, the Mundaneum, the project of indexing the world literature, and the image speaks for itself : there is A or even The Man of the project, and then there is the petites mains. It’s about document and even more about documen.

The reality of technical sexism, which is the subject on which Isabelle Collet has worked extensively, is that women are, since these fields are no longer part of the service sector, mainly excluded from technical training and environments, even from technical imaginations that are essentially masculine (geek, programmer, hacker).

The introduction of microcomputers has produced hackers’ societies […] almost entirely men’s and anti-girl. […] The hacker has become the ideal model of the computer scientist. Not only does this career no longer match with the image that girls have of themselves, but it even appears to be frankly hostile to them.

This conception shapes our perception: when we see a woman behind a screen, she is not coding in python or in haskell or even in html, she is treating emails for a higher ranking man. She is not a geek, a programmer nor a hacker, she is a secretary or a human computer.

content warning and before moving on to the next slide, I must warn you, it’s neither my insolence nor my dishonesty that has led me to include mysogynist insults in this slide.

There is this persisting conception in our studies that strikes me more and more, that is the working women figure is a creation, and it justifies its existence, its consistance as an extension of men, just as media in McLuhan words.

We find this idea of women as a technical extension in the Viliers de l’Isle-Adam Novel The Future Eve or Tomorrow’s Eve where a fictionalized Edison build the perfect woman as the first women robot for a Lord desperatly inlove.

The novel describes all the mechanics, the technical implementation of what a woman is or what she should be, even explaining how to implement the female pleasure on a technical level. This myth of the andreid is not just fictional, we find it also in the designs of the first chat agents that turn out to be 2.0 secretaries, extensions of man-woman domination relationships, obedient, polite, submissive, flattered when insulted (the “I blush if I could syndrom” witch was for more than 10 years the answer of Siri when insulted).

On this topic, I highly encourage you to follow Lai-Tze Fan and Hasti Atapour’s work that they presented yesterday on The Evolution of Siri’s Sexism and Apple’s Corporate Social Responsibility. If you missed it, it’s worth going back in time.

The place where I think punchcards operators, computers, and andreides meet, is a pattern based on service, but also on a hierarchy between making, factories and thinking, academics. The petites mains, whether they are dressmakers, operators, editors or secretaries, not only participate in the constitution of knowledge but they determine its existence.

It is precisely on this aspect that I would like to contribute but, this is the rather ironic nature of my approach, it is not directly a question of the petites mains revalorisation.

First of all, I can’t pretend to revalue the participation of human computers, keypunch operators or even today’s working women in computing as one single entity : as Valérie Shafer reminds us in Connecting Women, social and political contexts are obviously very different in each case.

We can’t get justice by blending status.

However, there are, I believe, some common issues that come not so much from a diversity of backgrounds as from science patterns: all women in these fields are paid less than men in the same profession, and there is a broad principle of devaluation of their work. Issues of their non-crediting and “invisibilization” are not the core of the problem. They are only symptoms of a deeper concern: the conception of knowledge emergence implying that heads think first and hands do second.

I identify several potential drifts in the revaluation approach: first, the risk, as highlighted by Crystal Bennes in Klara and the Bomb, of producing an alternative history, and of creating a caste of exceptions.

Like Sadie Plant, in her book Ones + Zero, Bennes’ argument is that the production of a feminist history that replaces male figures with female ones will not impact the problem of the dominant history at the roots.

There is also the risk of creating mythical figures as imposing as Father Busa.

We don’t need mothers, or authority figures of lone scholar, we need communities models.

Besides, not all women who worked in the development of computer science were Ada Lovelace or Grace Murray Hooper, and not all women were hidden by a system, some agreed with the system in place.

Above all, there is the risk of glorification, maybe the most insidious one: among the computers and operators, some of these women have contributed to destructive activities by providing data to test various bombs (like the ENIAC six).

[…] just because women were involved in this work, and that their work has been suppressed, it does not mean they should be celebrated as feminist heroes. The work these women did had serious and damaging consequences in the real world, and I cannot talk about them without talking about the appalling impact of their work.

On a more concrete level, listing all the actors in the production of an article, would have the effect of what I would call a film credits: in cinemas, no one stays to look at the names of all the people, and only the name of the director as the unique and lone producer is kept in mind.

Many of the archival recovery efforts in the early years of DH deployed a similar additive logic, despite their good intentions. When these efforts focused on adding race or gender to digital archives and data sets, there was an implication that simply adding new data as content is all that is needed to get at some truth about race or gender. While it is hard to argue against, for example, including women authors in a database of nineteenth-century writers, such an approach is more additive than integrative or relationnal.

To say with McPherson, to add is not to include and since there is an epistemological model at the foundation of power and domination dynamics, it is unlikely that the issue will be resolved in a single generation time. (sadly but we will keep working on it)

The issue is therefore not so much to reshape myths and represententions, as to challenge patterns

To redesign our critical knowledge in Digital Humanities, the “petites mains” model intends to analyse conditions of knowledge production and transmission in the Humanities to bypass a traditional model.

And, to conclude my presentation, I would like to acknowledge a biased approach of mine that is very much centered on equality issues, very much informed by feminist readings.

This is not to say that the ‘petites mains’ are not the hands of other communities, and in particular of visible or invisible minorities. There is a large colonial and post-colonial angle to the petites mains that involves many other issues.

And here I mentionned the T-shirt slogan of Casilli, who worked on digital labor.

There is no artificial intelligence, only the work of someone else’s click.

This is why the topic of the transparency of the production processes is a core issue of our research that we have to grasp. It is important to document our research project along the way, as McPherson reminds us in Feminist in Sowtware Lab, because it is not so much our job to conceive working tools that will change and save the world and culture as it is to trace and witness working practices.