I’m proposing the creation of a digital archive for textual and visual material related to mainframe computers. As a part of the curation process, we will perform glitches or additional manipulations of the material as a method interrogate the assumptions we have about business computing and mainframe computers.

Both minicomputers and super computers are well understood in academia. Digital humanities emerged in a period when computing costs dropped precipitously through innovations related to the microprocessor. Scientific computing relied on supercomputers addressed on complex mathematical calculations. Although its birth place can be traced to the academy, mainframe computers mostly found application in business contexts. Given its pedigree, mainframe computing is an under explored topic in digital humanities. Yet concepts made popular by mainframe computing live on in today’s software infrastructure in the form of batch processing, multitenancy in systems, timesharing of compute / storage resources and transactional databases. The age of Big Iron also continued the contribution of women to information technology often made less visible than those made by men. For example, the theory of machine-independent programming languages and the creation of FLOW-MATIC language by Grace Hopper, which was extended as COBOL, the principal program language used program mainframe computers.

This project will handle subject matter germane to the many facets and specters of digital humanities. Using frameworks like Wax from the minimal computing group ensures some longevity of the archive in question. Mainframe computers continue to power the majority of credit card transaction processing. The prominence of this type of hardware in governmental payment process came to light when stimulus checks weren’t issued in a timely manner during the pandemic. Maintenance (or lack thereof) of our critical technology is a major concern of digital infrastructure scholarship. Historical research will be critical to reconstruct a cultural particularities of time and place. It would also be advisable to

I am also keen on inviting collaborators with different skill sets. Some may want to work through the issue of cataloging, while others write essays explaining how mainframes function, what work they do or what the outputs are like. If we want to take a deformative approach to the archive, we could have someone coming from a design perspective (Adobe tools, PhotoMosh), another from an informed naif (data bending with Audacity/converted text file), while a third collaborator could deploy an algorithmic approach (software libraries like glitch-this or pixelsort). Regardless of how we approach the archive, I expect curation and critical writing will be instrumental in guiding audiences through the material.