In This Issue

"Verba volent et scripta manent" ("Words fly away, the written word is permanent"). This ancient maxim lies at the heart of technological histories about voice recording, courtroom transcription, and translation across linguistic and physiological borders. Greg Downey ("Constructing "Computer-Compatible" Stenographers: The Transition to Real-Time Transcription in Courtroom Reporting") explores the emergence of computer-aided technologies in the workplace of stenographers, who turn spoken words into written text. This is a labor history story—skilled workers retraining themselves in computer fluency, thus maintaining their status as guarantors of the courtroom's verbal memory on whose accuracy judges, juries, attorneys, and, increasingly, the news media depend. It is also a story of a demanding computerization challenge: how to produce transcripts from spoken words and, by the 1980s, real-time captions of sufficient accuracy to stand up in court. It is a story of the Department of Defense–funded attempt to create Russian-language machine translators at IBM which would spin off into private-sector computer aided transcription systems. Finally, it is the story of a popular and political movement to provide captioning service for the deaf and hard of hearing. As Downey tells them, these interwoven stories do not arrive at a stable technological endpoint. The increasingly female skilled workers who produce text in courtrooms and caption lines across television screens continue to ride the tiger of rapidly changing systems designed to produce text that satisfies both the cost counters and those who require a high standard of accuracy.

Carolyn Thomas de la Peña ("'Bleaching the Ethiopian': Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-Ray Experiments") takes as a starting point her own replication of a long-standing historical error—that in 1903, Dr. Henry Pancoast conducted experiments using X rays to turn the skin of black patients white. What was it about X rays, with their blend of high science and what seemed to be magic, and about the embedded racial hierarchies of the time that gave this false story its legs? Citing Rebecca Herzig's call to "interrogate the tools that make racial hierarchies possible," de la Peña follows an elusive trail through popular press accounts of X-ray experiments generally and a modest number of striking articles reporting breathlessly on X rays used to whiten black bodies. X rays made such an exciting subject—and X-ray devices were so cheap and popularly available—that discourse about them during the early twentieth century oscillated between the scientific language of precise understatement and the enthusiastic excesses of medical quackery. Tall tales of turning black skin into the purest white overflow with technological fantasy. They also pulsate with early-twentieth-century racism and touch a raw societal nerve, the volatile question of how to distinguish, and thereby protect, a black– white racial divide in American society. It is precisely their fantastic quality that makes these accounts a valuable resource for understanding what remains an under-researched border area, a place where technological and racial history might meet to both subdisciplines' benefit.

When corporate research teams and university scientists meet in the intense force field of an emergent research technology, what kinds of interactions occur between the for-profit and the academic worlds? Cyrus Mody ("Corporations, Universities, and Instrumental Communities: Commercializing Probe Microscopy, 1981–1996") interprets the first decade of a radically new type of nano-scale microscope ("probe microscopy") as a loosely coupled network of researchers. Some worked at corporations such as IBM and Bell Labs, where market strategies channeled the new research in tightly focussed directions. Less constrained academics interacted more playfully "in a permissive atmosphere," where only the faintest of lines distinguished professors from graduate students, or instrument-makers from users. Academics routinely redesigned their own instruments and the instruments themselves circulated in a barter economy: sometimes loaned, sometimes purchased as a partially complete kit. Working with the new instruments almost seemed its own reward. Gradually, however, probe microscopes took on a more stable form, as standardized black box microscopes began to become available for a much larger market of users who did not want to create their own tools. Mody calls the early probe microscope network an "instrumental...