Good girls, bold girls – but not böse

That first sentence of a book, including non-fiction books, may set the tone for what’s to come. For my memoir, it’s a translation of Brave meisjes komen in de hemel, brutale overal: good girls go to heaven, bold ones go everywhere.

I had read a book with that title some 25 years ago. It was originally written by Ute Ehrhardt in 1994 and translated from German to Dutch and published a year later. For the memoir, I had translated the Dutch title of the book into English myself: the brutale translates to ‘bold’ according to me, my dictionary (a Prisma Woordenboek hard copy), and an online dictionary. Bold means “(of a person, action, or idea) showing a willingness to take risks; confident and courageous.” according to the Oxford dictionary (and similarly here) and it’s in the same league as audacious, daring, brazen, and perky. It has a positive connotation.

What I, perhaps, ought to have done last year, is to find out whether the book also had been translated into English and trust that translator. As it turned out, I’m glad I did not do so, which brings me to the more substantive part of the post. I wanted to see whether I could find the book in order to link it in this post. I did. Interestingly, the word used in the English title was “bad” rather than ‘bold’, yet brutaal is not at all necessarily bad, nor is the book about women being bad. Surely something must have gotten warped in translation there?!

I took the hard copy from the bookshelf and checked the fine-print: it listed the original German title as Gute Mädchen kommen in den Himmel, böse überall hin. Hm, bӧse is not good. It has 17 German-to-English translations and none is quite as flattering as bold, not at all. This leaves either bad translations to blame or there was a semantic shift in the German-to-Dutch translation. Considering the former first, it appeared that the German-Dutch online dictionary did not offer nice Dutch words for bӧse either. Getting up from my chair again to consult my hard copy Prisma German-Dutch dictionary did not pay off either, except for one, maybe (ondeugend). It does not even list brutaal as possible translation. Was the author, Dr Ehrhardt of the Baby Boomer generation, still so indoctrinated in the patriarchy and Christianity – Gute vs Das Bӧse – as to think that not being a smiling nice girl must mean being bӧse? The term did not hold back the Germans, by the way: it was the best-sold non-fiction book in Germany in 1995, my Dutch copy stated. Moreover, it turned out to be at second place overall since German book sales counting started 60 years ago, including having been a whopping 107 weeks at first place in the Spiegel bestseller list. What’s going on here? Would the Germans be that interested in ‘bad’ girls? Not quite. The second option applies, i.e., the the semantic shift for the Dutch translation.

The book’s contents is not about bad, mean, or angry women at all and the subtitle provides a further hint to that: waarom lief zijn vrouwen geen stap verder brengt ‘why being nice won’t get women even one step ahead’. Instead of being pliant, submissive, and self-sabotaging in several ways, and therewith have our voices ignored, contributions downplayed, and being passed over for jobs and promotions, it seeks to give women a kick in the backside in order to learn to stand one’s ground and it provides suggestions to be heard and taken into account by avoiding the many pitfalls. Our generation of children of the Baby Boomers would improve the world better than those second wave feminists tried to do, and this book fitted right within the Zeitgeist. It was the girl power decade in the 1990s, where women took agency to become master of their own destiny, or at least tried to. The New Woman – yes, capitalised in the book. Agent Dana Scully of the X Files as the well-dressed scientist and sceptic investigator. Buffy the vampire slayer. Xena, Warrior Princess. The Spice Girls. Naomi Wolf’s Fire with Fire (that, by the way, wasn’t translated into Dutch). Reading through the book again now, it comes across as a somewhat dated use-case-packed manifesto about the pitfalls to avoid and how to be the architect of your own life. That’s not being bad, is it.

I suppose I have to thank the German-to-Dutch book translator Marten Hofstede for putting a fitting Dutch title to the content of the book. It piqued my interest in the bookstore at the train station, and I bought and read it in hat must have been 1997. It resonated. To be honest, if the Dutch title would have used any of the listed translations in the online dictionary – such as kwaad, verstoord, and nijdig – then I likely would not have bought the book. Having had to be evil or perpetually angry to go everywhere, anywhere and upward would have been too steep price to pay. Luckily, bold was indeed the right attribute. Perhaps for the generation after me, i.e., who are now in their twenties, it’s not about being bold but about being, as a normal way of outlook and interaction in society. Of course a woman is entitled to live her own life, as any human being is.

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A handful of memoirs and autobiographies for computer science

Since I published my second book, that memoir on a scenic route into computer science, several people have asked me “why?” and “what makes yours stand out from the crowd?”. The answer to the latter is easy: there is no crowd. (The brief answer to ‘why’ is mentioned in the Introduction chapter). Let me elaborate a little.

In the early stage of writing the book, I dutifully did do my market research to answer the typical starter questions like: What books in your genre or on your topic are already out there? How crowded is the field? Will your prospective book be just another one on that pile? Will it stand out as different? And if so, is that an interesting difference to at least some readership segment so that it will have potential to be sold beyond a close circle of friends and family? So, I searched and searched and searched, in late 2020 and again twice in 2021, and even now when writing this post. Memoirs by female computer scientists, by male computer scientists, whatever gender computer scientist in academia. Autobiographies as well then. I stretched the search criteria further, into the not-in-their-own-words biographies of computer science professors.

Collage made with the respective covers or first page of the memoir and autobiography books listed and linked here.

If you take your time searching for those books, you should be able to find the following four books and booklets of the memoir or autobiography variety, by computer science professors, on computing, computing milieux, or computer science:

• James Morris’ memoir that was published in the same week as mine was in late 2021. It covers his 60 years career in computer science and, according to the book’s tweet-size blurb “is a search for intelligence across multiple facets of the human condition—religion and science, evolution, and innovation”.
• The early years of academic computing professional memoir by Kenneth King made available in 2014 (free pdf).
• The unpublished memoir by Ray Miller, on 50 years in computing (1953-1993), online available from the IEEE Computer Society as part of its computer history museum.
• Maurice Wilkes’ hardcopy autobiography from 1985 that is, consequently, hard to access.

That’s all. Four retired (and some meanwhile deceased) computer science professors telling their tale, three of which cover only the early days of computing.

Collage made with the covers or first page of the quite related memoir and autobiography books listed and linked here.

There are a few very recent memoirs by professors that were in print or announced to go in print soon, on attendant topics, notably:

• Cecilia Aragon’s “Flying Free”, which was published in 2020. It is about becoming the first Latina pilot on the US Aerobatic Team. She is also a professor in computer science.
• Denis Protti’s professional memoir about health informatics, which was in press in 2021 and is about the developments in that specific field of study and his experience of that field’s developments.
• Sherry Turkle‘s The Empathy Diaries: A memoir, also published in 2021. She’s a social scientist at MIT studying people’s relationships with computers.

What there are lots of, are books about, and occasionally by, ‘celebrity’ people in IT and computing who made it in industry these days, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Sheryl Sandberg, and famous people in computing history, such as Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, George Boole, and Alan Turing (also about, not by). And there are short and long memoirs about tech by journalists and writers and by engineers and programmers who write, such as on Linux in Australia (here) or 10 years in Silicon Valley (here). There are also a few professional memoir essays and articles by computer science professors, such as about the development of the network time protocol by David Mills (here).

The people ‘out there’ – outside of the ivory tower of academia – do have lots of assumptions about computer science professors. When I mention to them that, yes, I’m one of those, at UCT even, a not uncommon reaction is an involuntary reflex of apprehension. The eyes move to a corner of the eye socket, the head turns a little and moves back, and the upper body follows, even if only slightly. I notice. But what do you really know about us? Nothing, really.

Even among academics in computer science, we have only sketchy information about our colleagues’ respective backgrounds. Yes there are the privileged ones, who had early access to computers, tinkered with them in their spare time, got their pizza delivered, participated in programming contests and so on. But there are others who made it. Who escaped persecution in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and had to find their way in a different country, whose first interaction with a computer was only at university, or who grew up in some hamlet with limited electricity and potable water. Who came from a broken home, or who had to leave family and friends to get that elusive job in the scarce academic job market many kilometers away, or whose relations stranded due to the two-body problem (partner who is also an academic, but in a different city or country). Who made it against the odds. And there are those who defected from physics, or who took a stroll out of philosophy to never return, or who still flip-flop with chemistry, to name but a few, and who thus have at least two specialisations under their belt. Those who know about more stuff than just computing.

That’s just about an academic’s background. What do you know of our daily activities? Nothing really, either. Assumptions abound; there are about as many memes and jokes about our jobs as assumption. And movies, TV series, and fiction novels that aren’t necessarily depicting it accurately either.

But us, in our own words? The memoir and autobiography books literally can be counted on one hand. I can assure you it’s not because we have no life and have nothing to say. We do. For instance, it takes about 10-30 years before the theories and techniques we investigate will mature enough to seep into the wider society. Impactful, cool, and fun things happen along the way. Those ‘infoboxes’ from Google when it returns the search results? The theory and techniques behind it date back to the late 1990s with ontologies and I was a part of that. Toy drones? There was one to play with at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2006 (ECAI’06) that I attended, when the first small toy drones needed to be equipped with ‘intelligent’ processing of sensor data. The drone demo area was suitably demarcated with red-white coloured tape, for neither the engineers nor the organisers, nor us as attendees, were convinced it was safe to make it fly around without causing trouble.

Screengrab of “Dr Fill” in action in last year’s crossword puzzle contest: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIjD-sIDCeE

The demo session at ECAI’06 also had a crossword puzzle contest with WebCrow: researchers against an algorithm that trawled the Web for answers. The 25 of us onsite participants – perhaps the first ever to participate in such a contest – sat on uncomfortable plastic chairs in cinema style in a section of a large hall in the conference venue at Riva del Garda in Italy. Onlookers marveled that the event really took place, and unsure about which horse to bet on. The algorithm won, but we had fun. Last year’s news that an algorithmic solver won from expert human puzzlers seems a bit late and old news. I can very well imagine what those human participants must have felt.

Maybe you don’t care about computer science professors or about early days of new theories and techniques and how they came about. We all have our interests and time is limited. That’s fine; I don’t read all books either. But, if you were to ever wonder about the human in the computer science academic, there are, for now, those four books listed above, mine, and the other three books that are quite nearby in scope. Happy reading!