On Modern Computing and Beauty: Aesthetics as a Motivation for Computer Science

David Bates, Stanford University

I track an unlikely origin story in computing that sparked universities to create an undergraduate computer science (CS) major: computer graphics. This was an area where new relationships formed among people, universities, and technology because of the pursuit of beauty. As computers initiated new intimate and psychic relations, a system of “institutional isomorphism,” as Paul DiMaggio and Woody Powell call it, developed where professional networks and a type of collective cognition caused institutions to copy each other and compete over areas like computer graphics. I start by exploring survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Going back to 1970, the data tell the story of when universities started a CS major and how enrollments in CS differed by gender. Then, with an archive including oral histories and university administrative documents, I “sample” three institutions within the organizational ecology and analyze the history of computer graphics at the University of Utah, Brown, and Carnegie Mellon. Along with showing the class and gender implications of the contagious explosion of CS, I document how intellectual stimulation, network connections, and aesthetic pursuits all drove professors and students to harness the bureaucracy of colleges to create a CS major. CS was the quintessential American discipline of the twentieth century because of its negotiations and compromises between interventions in society and contemplation within the university, each decision being laden with values within affective structures of relations. CS’s ties to industry made it modern, but its connection to aesthetics kept it linked to the liberal arts. I end with a coda about the historic irony of CS starting to lose its rapidly gained prestige as a major because of generative AI. Studying changes in this dynamic discipline over time may offer hints at its next shift.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 38. Gender and the Making of Knowledge across Traditional and Modern Institutions