Paul N Edwards
Biographic Data
| ID | 277307 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul N Edwards |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul N |
| FAMILY NAME | Edwards |
| SIGNATURE | EDWARDS P N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 606 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The End of Science? Agnosis and American Fascism
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to understanding the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of the 2025 Bernal Lecture b…
One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax
Re-integrating scholarly infrastructure: The ambiguous role of data sharing platforms
Web-based platforms play an increasingly important role in managing and sharing research data of all types and sizes. This article presents a case study of the data storage, sharing, and management platform Figshare. We argue that such platforms are displacing and reconfiguring the infrastructure of norms, technologies, and institutions that underlies traditional scholarly communication. Using a theoretical framework that combines infrastructure …
Big Data Is the Answer … But What Is the Question
Rethinking histories of data requires not only better answers to existing questions, but also better questions. We suggest eight such questions here. What counts as data? How are objects related to data? What are digital data? What makes data measurable, and what does quantification do to data? What counts as an “information age”? Why do we keep data, and how do we decide which data to lose or forget? Who owns data, and who uses them? Finally, ho…
Producing “one vast index: Google Book Search as an algorithmic system
In 2004, Google embarked on a massive book digitization project. Forty library partners and billions of scanned pages later, Google Book Search has provided searchable text access to millions of books. While many details of Google’s conversion processes remain proprietary secret, here we piece together their general outlines by closely examining Google Book Search products, Google patents, and the entanglement of libraries and computer scientists…
Knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene
The technosphere metabolizes not only energy and materials, but information and knowledge as well. This article first examines the history of knowledge about large-scale, long-term, anthropogenic environmental change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, major systems were built for monitoring both the environment and human activity of all kinds, for modeling geophysical processes such as climate change, and for preserving and refining scientific memo…
Afterworld
Most writers are concerned with how globalities are created, asserted and deconstructed by means of concepts, language, ideas and ideologies. They ask after the many uses of the term 'global', the actors who invoke it, the context of assembly and the stakes involved. Solutions to putatively global problems have figured multiple, often competing views of agency and power at many scales: carbon accounting for self-monitoring individuals; carbon tra…
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure st…
Michael D. Gordin. Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done before and after Global English
Modern science has always been an international, and therefore multilingual, endeavor. In this fascinating and delightful book, Michael D. Gordin argues that unusual characteristics of scientific language render the problem of multilingualism especially difficult. Science demands exceptionally precise description; glosses on atomic structure or relativity theory simply will not do. Many discoveries require terms for newly observed (and therefore …
Writing upon System-Instituting Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
This chapter explores the emergence of "culture" as a concept in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, arguing that it arose from the need to adjudicate claims about societal systems within a public space beyond overt politics. Siskin links the development of "culture" to the rise of liberalism's politics of blame, suggesting that determining what aspects of "The System" functioned effectively and what required reform became the domain of cultu…
Science friction: Data, metadata, and collaboration
When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call 'science friction'. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata--usually viewed simply as 'data about data', describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets--serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that me…
AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information
History of climate modeling
The history of climate modeling begins with conceptual models, followed in the 19th century by mathematical models of energy balance and radiative transfer, as well as simple analog models. Since the 1950s, the principal tools of climate science have been computer simulation models of the global general circulation. From the 1990s to the present, a trend toward increasingly comprehensive coupled models of the entire climate system has dominated t…
History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa
This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for West…
Understanding infrastructure: History, heuristics and cyberinfrastructure policy
None Available
Revolutionary Secrets: Technology’s Role in the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement
In the late 1980s, Operation Vula brought exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders and military capacity into South Africa despite legal and military obstacles. According to participants, a purpose-built encrypted communication system was critical to this success, but what was the significance of the technology? Was it simply a catalyst for change within the ANC leadership, or did the system crucially alter the political situation? This cas…
Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism
This chapter explores the history of a global governance institution, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from its nineteenth‐century origins through the beginnings of a planetary meteorological observing network, the WMO’s World Weather Watch (WWW), in the 1960s. This history illustrates a profoundly important transition from voluntarist internationalism, based on shared interests, to quasi‐obligatory globalism, based on a more permanen…
Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems
Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance
In recent years, Earth systems science has advanced rapidly, helping to transform climate change and other planetary risks into major political issues. Changing the Atmosphere strengthens our understanding of this important link between expert knowledge and environmental governance. In so doing, it illustrates how the emerging field of science and technology studies can inform our understanding of the human dimensions of global environmental chan…
Global climate science, uncertainty and politics: Data‐laden models, model‐filtered data
Global climate change is among today’s most visible and contro versial areas of science-based policy. By almost any measure— number of researchers, size of budgets, attention from the public and from policymakers—the importance of this field has grown dramati cally during the last decade. The collective annual budget of the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a clearinghouse or ganization charged with coordinating research sponsored by a …
Y2k: Millennial reflections on computers as infrastructure
Computers have become the control, information storage, and information processing technology of choice in many other, pre‐existing infrastructures. This essay argues that historians of computers and information technology should expand their agenda to include the origins and impacts of this phenomenon. Studying computer‐based infrastructures could lead to a new historiographical approach focussing on 'internetworks'. These are very large, integr…
Virtual Machines, Virtual Infrastructures: The New Historiography of Information Technology Computer: A History of the Information Machine . Martin Campbell-Kelly , William Aspray Information Technolo…
Aramis, or the Love of Technology . Bruno Latour , Catherine Porter
Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change by Donald MacKenzie
962 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Me, depicting his relentless but futile efforts to impose accountability on those responsible for auto plant closings that devastated his home town of Flint, Michigan. The last essays in this thought-provoking collection pause to ex amine controversial aspects of our current moment of postmodern disillusionment. Orvell is impressed by the use of traditionally “low brow” media to confront serious issues, a…
Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure st…
Science friction: Data, metadata, and collaboration
When scientists from two or more disciplines work together on related problems, they often face what we call 'science friction'. As science becomes more data-driven, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, demand increases for interoperability among data, tools, and services. Metadata--usually viewed simply as 'data about data', describing objects such as books, journal articles, or datasets--serve key roles in interoperability. Yet we find that me…
Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance
In recent years, Earth systems science has advanced rapidly, helping to transform climate change and other planetary risks into major political issues. Changing the Atmosphere strengthens our understanding of this important link between expert knowledge and environmental governance. In so doing, it illustrates how the emerging field of science and technology studies can inform our understanding of the human dimensions of global environmental chan…
History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa
This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for West…
Global climate science, uncertainty and politics: Data‐laden models, model‐filtered data
Global climate change is among today’s most visible and contro versial areas of science-based policy. By almost any measure— number of researchers, size of budgets, attention from the public and from policymakers—the importance of this field has grown dramati cally during the last decade. The collective annual budget of the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a clearinghouse or ganization charged with coordinating research sponsored by a …
Knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene
The technosphere metabolizes not only energy and materials, but information and knowledge as well. This article first examines the history of knowledge about large-scale, long-term, anthropogenic environmental change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, major systems were built for monitoring both the environment and human activity of all kinds, for modeling geophysical processes such as climate change, and for preserving and refining scientific memo…
Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism
This chapter explores the history of a global governance institution, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from its nineteenth‐century origins through the beginnings of a planetary meteorological observing network, the WMO’s World Weather Watch (WWW), in the 1960s. This history illustrates a profoundly important transition from voluntarist internationalism, based on shared interests, to quasi‐obligatory globalism, based on a more permanen…
History of climate modeling
The history of climate modeling begins with conceptual models, followed in the 19th century by mathematical models of energy balance and radiative transfer, as well as simple analog models. Since the 1950s, the principal tools of climate science have been computer simulation models of the global general circulation. From the 1990s to the present, a trend toward increasingly comprehensive coupled models of the entire climate system has dominated t…
AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information
The Army and the Microworld: Computers and the Politics of Gender Identity
Re-integrating scholarly infrastructure: The ambiguous role of data sharing platforms
Web-based platforms play an increasingly important role in managing and sharing research data of all types and sizes. This article presents a case study of the data storage, sharing, and management platform Figshare. We argue that such platforms are displacing and reconfiguring the infrastructure of norms, technologies, and institutions that underlies traditional scholarly communication. Using a theoretical framework that combines infrastructure …
Revolutionary Secrets: Technology’s Role in the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement
In the late 1980s, Operation Vula brought exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders and military capacity into South Africa despite legal and military obstacles. According to participants, a purpose-built encrypted communication system was critical to this success, but what was the significance of the technology? Was it simply a catalyst for change within the ANC leadership, or did the system crucially alter the political situation? This cas…
Producing “one vast index: Google Book Search as an algorithmic system
In 2004, Google embarked on a massive book digitization project. Forty library partners and billions of scanned pages later, Google Book Search has provided searchable text access to millions of books. While many details of Google’s conversion processes remain proprietary secret, here we piece together their general outlines by closely examining Google Book Search products, Google patents, and the entanglement of libraries and computer scientists…
Hyper Text and Hypertension: Post-Structuralist Critical Theory, Social Studies of Science and Software
Hypertext - advanced software for organizing information according to webs of conceptual, rather than symbolic, links - has recently provoked humanists to reconsider post-structuralist semiotic concepts. Debates about the design and uses of hypertext, among both software developers and humanists, reflect a conflict between two problematic views of text: as a medium for social interaction, and as a replication of a cognitive structure. Post-struct…
Virtual Machines, Virtual Infrastructures: The New Historiography of Information Technology Computer: A History of the Information Machine . Martin Campbell-Kelly , William Aspray Information Technolo…
The closed world: Systems discourse, military strategy and post WWII American historical consciousness
The Army and the Microworld: Computers and the Politics of Gender Identity
Hyper Text and Hypertension: Post-Structuralist Critical Theory, Social Studies of Science and Software
Hypertext - advanced software for organizing information according to webs of conceptual, rather than symbolic, links - has recently provoked humanists to reconsider post-structuralist semiotic concepts. Debates about the design and uses of hypertext, among both software developers and humanists, reflect a conflict between two problematic views of text: as a medium for social interaction, and as a replication of a cognitive structure. Post-struct…
Cyberpunks in Cyberspace: The Politics of Subjectivity in the Computer Age
In the Cold War, Americans constructed the political world as a closed system of ideological conflict. Computers were developed to support a closed-world discourse with centralized, computerized military command and control, embodied in Vietnam-era systems and Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Simultaneously, at the level of individual minds, a cyborg discourse about intelligent machines linked the microworlds constituted by computer program…
Technological Perspectives on Behavioral Change by Michael B. Schiffer
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 721 constructed from a rereading of this book, is “Communications is its own accelerant.” That is, the better and faster we can communicate, the better and faster we can disseminate the means to communicate even more and faster. Finally, more and faster communication is not always better. Lubar himself expresses the intimidating aspect of information when he says he finds himself “afloat in a world of informati…
Technological Perspectives on Behavioral Change
Human societies have always been characterized by a dependence on artifacts, from prehistoric stone tools to modern electronic devices. Technology responds to and affects virtually all human behavior; yet the interdependence of behavior and artifacts has never been studied intensively. Archaeologist Schiffer now draws on his discipline's familiarity with artifacts--and the processes of change they reveal--to offer new insight into the study of be…
The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology—and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently dispar…
Global comprehensive models in politics and policymaking: Editorial essay
Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology
Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology by Emerson W. Pugh
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 385 is no attempt at theoretical reflection; the work remains empirical throughout. A more complex study on the subject, promised by the title—“science between university and industry” in the Nether lands—has yet to appear. But this book nevertheless provides a good starting point. Karel Davids Dr. Davids, professor of economic and social history at the Vrije Universiteit Am sterdam, is the author of Zeewezen…
Computer Pioneers
Aramis, or the Love of Technology . Bruno Latour , Catherine Porter
Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change by Donald MacKenzie
962 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Me, depicting his relentless but futile efforts to impose accountability on those responsible for auto plant closings that devastated his home town of Flint, Michigan. The last essays in this thought-provoking collection pause to ex amine controversial aspects of our current moment of postmodern disillusionment. Orvell is impressed by the use of traditionally “low brow” media to confront serious issues, a…
Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change
Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. Evelyn Fox Keller
Y2k: Millennial reflections on computers as infrastructure
Computers have become the control, information storage, and information processing technology of choice in many other, pre‐existing infrastructures. This essay argues that historians of computers and information technology should expand their agenda to include the origins and impacts of this phenomenon. Studying computer‐based infrastructures could lead to a new historiographical approach focussing on 'internetworks'. These are very large, integr…
Virtual Machines, Virtual Infrastructures: The New Historiography of Information Technology Computer: A History of the Information Machine . Martin Campbell-Kelly , William Aspray Information Technolo…
Global climate science, uncertainty and politics: Data‐laden models, model‐filtered data
Global climate change is among today’s most visible and contro versial areas of science-based policy. By almost any measure— number of researchers, size of budgets, attention from the public and from policymakers—the importance of this field has grown dramati cally during the last decade. The collective annual budget of the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a clearinghouse or ganization charged with coordinating research sponsored by a …
Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance
In recent years, Earth systems science has advanced rapidly, helping to transform climate change and other planetary risks into major political issues. Changing the Atmosphere strengthens our understanding of this important link between expert knowledge and environmental governance. In so doing, it illustrates how the emerging field of science and technology studies can inform our understanding of the human dimensions of global environmental chan…
Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems
Meteorology as Infrastructural Globalism
This chapter explores the history of a global governance institution, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from its nineteenth‐century origins through the beginnings of a planetary meteorological observing network, the WMO’s World Weather Watch (WWW), in the 1960s. This history illustrates a profoundly important transition from voluntarist internationalism, based on shared interests, to quasi‐obligatory globalism, based on a more permanen…
Understanding infrastructure: History, heuristics and cyberinfrastructure policy
None Available
Revolutionary Secrets: Technology’s Role in the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement
In the late 1980s, Operation Vula brought exiled African National Congress (ANC) leaders and military capacity into South Africa despite legal and military obstacles. According to participants, a purpose-built encrypted communication system was critical to this success, but what was the significance of the technology? Was it simply a catalyst for change within the ANC leadership, or did the system crucially alter the political situation? This cas…
History of climate modeling
The history of climate modeling begins with conceptual models, followed in the 19th century by mathematical models of energy balance and radiative transfer, as well as simple analog models. Since the 1950s, the principal tools of climate science have been computer simulation models of the global general circulation. From the 1990s to the present, a trend toward increasingly comprehensive coupled models of the entire climate system has dominated t…
History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa
This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for West…
Computer Science (20 works) · Political science (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · World Wide Web (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Art (7 works) · History of Computing Technologies (7 works)