Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates…[Read more]

This chapter examines how activist ideals manifest in the realm of practice, emphasizing the reality of technical expertise running afoul of participatory goals in the practice of radio activism. A major plank of the radio activists’ work was the promotion of technical participation to novices through various activities such as radio s…[Read more]

Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy…[Read more]

This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article arg…[Read more]

This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and e…[Read more]

This paper examines imaginaries of work and labor in “open technology” projects (especially open source software and hackerspaces), based on ethnographic research in North America. It zeroes in on “diversity initiatives” within open technology projects. These initiatives are important because they expose many of the assumptions and tension…[Read more]

Medicine has long framed race relations in the Caribbean-that basin where African and European cultures have met from the beginning of the Colonial Period to the twentieth century. Whether Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum and President of the Royal Society of London, who as a physician wrote about African medical beliefs and…[Read more]

En 1974 la administración del Partido Popular bajo el gobernador Rafael Hernández Colon adquirió exitosamente la Puerto Rico Telephone Company (PRTC), cuyo dueño previo había sido el conglomerado International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT.). El estudio busca entender las causas y consecuencias de lo que se consideró ser un cambio monumental en la…[Read more]

Gonzalo Fernós Maldonado (1887-1966) fue uno de los arquitectos más destacados en Puerto Rico durante las primeras dïcadas del siglo XX, cuyos logros y habilidades lamentablemente han quedado en el olvido colectivo. Este libro, escrito por su nieto, trata de resucitar la historia de su vida en un momento histórico muy diferente al con…[Read more]

The Pan-American Scientific Congresses ushered a new scientific era in Latin America. Bringing together scientists, engineers, and medical researchers from both South and North America, they facilitated the exchange of ideas between the two regions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nobel Prize thinkers such as Albert Michelson and others,…[Read more]

Science and democracy are two of the most cherished values of Western Civilization, so much so that they are often associated with each other. With science, it is held, comes democracy. But, will democracy necessarily blossom with the seed of science? Inversely, does the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory on December 1, 2020 represent a predictor…[Read more]

When the same $9 billion allocated to a nation’s annual budget (Puerto Rico 2015) is spent on a single scientific instrument (Hubble telescope) or to administer a single scientific facility for a year (CERN), we might presume that science is today a monolithic enterprise, akin to what the pyramids of Ancient Egypt had been in their day. Yet when…[Read more]

Los Congresos Científicos Pan-Americanos abrieron una nueva época de intercambio científico no solamente dentro de los pa?ses de América Latina sino entre estos y los Estados Unidos. Figuras importantes como Albert. A. Michelson, ganador del Premio Nobel en 1907, regularmente atendieron estas conferencias, así ayudando a difundir los últimos avanc…[Read more]

Biology and Ethics provides a historian’s perspective of the attempts to ground an ethics within a biological framework. Aside from its analysis of schools as social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology, it attempts to evaluate their veracity using cases as Japan’s Unit 731, the Guatemala Syphilis study, and others. In spite of the much disputed…[Read more]

By taking water as a viewpoint, this dissertation reveals that the urban communities of seventeenth-century Holland were highly subsidiary in nature. Individual townspeople, men and women alike, knew how to fend for themselves, incidentally having recourse to other inhabitants, businessmen, corporations or magistrates. Together, they constituted a…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

Two art exhibitions, “Training Humans” and “Making Faces,” and the accompanying essay “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets” by Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, are making substantial impact on discourse taking place in the social and mass media networks, and some scholarly circles. Critical scrutiny reveals,…[Read more]

The contribution of women to the development of societies and medicine around the world cannot be overstated. Their contribution to medicine is great; this is seen, in particular, in their role among other physicians, obstetricians, nurses, herbalists, and assistant physicians. Despite the significant contribution of women to medicine and health…[Read more]

Literary journalism offers an important way for explaining the complexity of the scientific world to a lay audience. An analysis of two of Richard Preston’s pieces published by The New Yorker, “The Mountains of Pi” and “Capturing the Unicorn” and how they give emphasize science-in-the-making.

El presente artículo es un sucinto repaso del devenir histórico y tecnológico de PhiloBiblon, uno de los proyectos pioneros en las Humanidades Digitales aplicadas al estudio de las fuentes primarias de las literaturas hispánicas e ibéricas escritas durante la Edad Media y el Renacimiento. La historia del proyecto tiene como hilo conductor las dife…[Read more]