William Lockett

My research looks at the history of programming languages in the 1960s. I found a way into that story through American school children who participated, as subjects, in scientific studies of the learning process. Whenever I went looking for kids and computers in the ‘60s, I found a beautiful and strange, worrying and confused, admixture of art and science. Play experiments and logic toys; logic games and graphics fun; electromechanical study carrels and computerized teaching equipment—much burgeoned from the research sites where scholars and young coders tinkered together. I argue that this era—the era just before the arrival of the personal computer in 1975—transformed the meaning of screens into a context for reflection on the variability of mind and the structure of human relationships.

My first two scholarly articles from that project are “The Science of Fun and the War on Poverty” and “Autistic Mental Schema and the Graphical User Interface circa 1968.” Each text documents archival evidence of interactions between agents and patients of scientific research to show how frictions in clinical situations shaped mind-related concepts in tandem with the development of programmable, networked, screen-based computer technologies.

My goal as a researcher, teacher, and maker is to contribute to the re-building of the nexus of art and science, which I believe has been fragmented by disciplinary divisions and the traumas of modernity. As an organizer, I contributed to that mission through collaboration on the symposium Unfolding Intelligence: The Art and Science of Contemporary Computation. You can explore how my many course designs, my other conference organizing efforts, and my work as a creative coder and designer all pursue this goal, each in their own way: https://www.williamlockett.org/

Stevens Institute of Technology
Science, Technology, and Society
Lecturer 2023-present

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Center for Art, Science, and Technology
Department for the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow 2019-2022

Teaching Award
Outstanding Teaching Award
NYU Steinhardt, department of Media, Culture, and Communication 2019

Travel and research, awards and grants
Society for the History of Technology 2018
Special Interest Group on Computers, Information, and Society
Computer History Travel Award for “Archaeology of the Toposcope”

Society for the History of Technology 2017
Special Interest Group on Computers, Information, and Society
Michael S. Mahoney Travel Award for “Race in the Cybernetic Fold”

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Doctoral Award 2015-2018

Computers and Society — HSSC 371
Introduction to Science and Technology Studies — HSS 120