On June 18-19, the EUSP’s Center for Science and Technology Studies hosted a conference titled “Explorers and Pirates: Digital Creators and the Creation of Value(s).” The conference took place at the European University and the hotel Radisson Sonya.
Theoretical framework of the conference
Two days prior were devoted to a summer school at which international scholars presented on STS or other topics related to information technology. The school was opened by Michael Gordin from the History Department at Princeton University with a presentation on the history of the emergence and flourishing of machine translation. The author’s main thesis was that machine translation arose in the late 1950s due to the fact that at that time there were two primary languages in which scholars communicated and published: Russian and English. In the context of the Cold War, the possibility of following the scientific developments of potential opponents was made a priority. This provided the impetus for developing a system for automatically translating texts.
Next, there was a discussion session of works by associates of the STS Center, which continued over the first two days of the school. Discussion was conducted with all summer school participants, and a large number of comments were received from Martin Kenney, Olga Sezneva, Irina Nikiforova, and many others.
Marina Fedorova presented the results of her study of employees of Yandex’s Moscow office, where she showed the formation of professional identity within an employee community. Using the anthropology of profession and the theory of imagined communities, Fedorova concluded that the dichotomy of the “mathematician-engineer” plays a large role in how professionals in the area of software development perceive themselves. At the same time, however, the delineation of computer science as a science and software development as a business is problematic because they strongly interpenetrate one another.
Next, Alina Kontareva spoke about her experience researching regional development of information technology in Kazan. She studies how business, education and science interact in this region and in her presentation showed the forms in which these interactions exist.
Darya Savchenko then gave a report on how beginning programing educational programs for schoolchildren function in Estonia, and how this reflects upon the country’s international image. Last in that day’s workshop was Liliya Zemnukhova, who spoke about her experience studying Russian programmers living in Great Britain. The main difficulty in her work was selecting an adequate theoretical framework for explaining the existing status quo: Russian programmers have difficulty integrating into the surrounding culture since their professional identity cannot be compared with the surrounding citizens of another country.
The first day ended with a screening of the film “The Singularity,” organized for summer school participants by CEA Paris associate Alexei Grinbaum.
The second day of the school began with a presentation by David Kaiser from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the history of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitation. In his report Kaiser stressed the role of existing channels of scientific communication at the time, and especially the role of scientific correspondence and its impact on the emergence of discoveries such as the theory of gravitation, and others.
Following the presentation, discussion resumed on works by STS Center associates. Liubava Shatokhina presented the results of anthropological research on the mobility of Russian programmers in Finland, showing how they formed their professional and living environment. Finland may be called special country to move to, as it is not located in the center of the world’s labor markets and economy. It is regarded as a country not for making one’s career, but for living comfortably with one’s family. Next, Ekaterina Smirnova gave a report on career paths for Russian programmers in France. Alexandra Simonova concluded the session with a report devoted to contemporary Russian hackerspaces as space where innovation is created. Simonova showed how hackerspaces work and the networks of human and technological interaction exist within them.
At the end of the second day EUSP rector Oleg Kharkhordin gave a talk on a study of technological entrepreneurship in various countries. The main research results showed that a specific feature of Russian technical entrepreneurship is a desire for creativity and changing the world.
A two-day conference titled “Explorers and Pirates” followed the summer school. The conference was dedicated to new forms of informational artifacts and their creators on the Internet. Over the course of two days many people of international renown in the field of STS presented—Mario Biagioli from UC Davis/EUSP on the transformation of public property into information annexes on the Internet, Martin Giraudeau from the London School of Economics with a historical study of the emergence of business projects such as those in the late 18th century, Finn Brunton from NYU on cryptocurrencies and the contemporary history of Bitcoin, and many others. A special guest at the conference was Christopher Kelty, known for his fundamental research on programmer culture with the book Two Bits.
Alexei Knorre
