Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (review)

In Calculating a Natural World, Atushi Akera presents a detailed and historiographically novel history of computing. The organizing principle of Akera's book is pluralism. To Akera, there was no one central concept, core institution, or individual mastermind behind the computer revolution. Rather, the revolution was made by many people in many contexts, all linked together in shifting ecologies of knowledge, which are based on a tradition in science studies that treats knowledge production as an ecological process.¹ (That is, each history builds on others and illuminates the larger "ecology" of which it is part.) In keeping with this historical analysis, pluralism also describes Akera's methodology; to him, the history of computing should combine institutional history, intellectual history, and personal biography. Multiple perspectives are needed to tell a pluralistic story. As a result, the subjects of Akera's chapters range from a biography of John Mauchly and his role in the creation of the ENIAC computer to an institutional history of academic computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan.

Pluralism provides both a thread uniting the different subjects and historical approaches in different chapters and a frame through which Akera interprets the history of computing, in particular, and Cold War science, in general. The pluralistic approach provides a much deeper historical tapestry for him to work with and more accurately reflects the complexities of scientific development in the 20th century than a singular approach.

The book's central argument is that computing developed in a variety of institutional and social settings, a story that Akera persuasively argues is representative of the complexity of knowledge creation in many fields during the Cold War. Akera uses ecologies of knowledge as his main tool for conceptualizing the myriad sites of knowledge construction in the history of computing. He even provides visual representations of these ecologies that give an indication of the inter-relationships he describes. In this theoretical analysis, Akera specifically engages concepts such as Galison's trading zones²—conceptual areas where scientific and/ or technical disciplines overlap—and Latour's actor-network theory³ and provides a general, useful addition to the conceptual grounding of science studies. Calculating a Natural World thus provides updated theoretical tools for historians and sociologists of science while updating the historiography of computing.

From a traditional vantage point, Akera's book might seem disjointed, with no central actor, technology, or institution to anchor the narrative. Rather, the subject of study for Akera is the ecology of computing knowledge itself and the intersecting networks that constitute it. Thus understood, Akera presents the history of computing in the 20th century as the history of changing networks of actors. While these networks are constantly changing, they are stable enough over shorter time spans for Akera to identify several distinct periods in postwar computing. The individual chapters serve to document the fine changes in the circumstances of individual actors and institutions within those periods. The true strength of Akera's approach is in correlating these historical snapshots to the overall story of shifting ecologies of knowledge.

In connecting each chapter to the book's overall objective, Akera continually emphasizes contingency, a historical concept second in importance only to pluralism in his account. The contingencies of institutional location and academic training emerge from biographical accounts such as the chapter on John Mauchly. Similarly, we see contingency in the complex institutional relationships that sponsored computing research. If the reader takes nothing else from this book, it is that pluralism and contingency are defining characteristics of scientific research in the 20th century. Mauchly is perhaps the best example of this. In examining the circulation of knowledge leading up to the construction of ENIAC from the perspective of Mauchly's biography, Akera reveals direct parallels between the incremental changes in the design of ENIAC and Mauchly's own intellectual development, neither of which followed a predictable path.

Calculating...