Computing Legacies

A media history of simulation that contextualizes our digital heritage and the history of computing.

In Computing Legacies, Peter Krapp explores a media history of simulation to excavate three salient aspects of digital culture. Firstly, he profiles simulation as cultural technique, enabling symbolic work and foregrounding hypothetical literacy. Secondly, he positions simulation as crucial for the preservation of cultural memory, where modeling, emulation, and serious play are constitutive in how we relate to our mediated history. And lastly, despite suggestions that we may already live in a simulation, he interrogates how simulation can serve as critique of the computer age. 

In tracing our digital heritage, Computing Legacies elucidates inflection points where quantitative data becomes tractable for qualitative evaluations: modeling epidemics for scientific study or entertainment, emulating older devices, turning numerical calculations into music, conducting espionage in virtual worlds, and gamifying higher education. Simulation, this book demonstrates, is pivotal not only to high-tech research and to archives, museums, and the preservation of digital culture but also to our understanding of what it is to live and work under the technical conditions of computing.Introduction
1   Simulation as Cultural Technique
2   Is the Internet a Museum of Computing?
3   Fake Bit: Let It Bleep, Keep It Sample
4   Troll Security: Espionage in Virtual Worlds
5   Virtual U: The Simulation of Higher Education
Conclusion
Notes
Index“Computing Legacies deftly interrogates and synthesizes technical computer engineering literature with contemporary media studies scholarship to demonstrate how simulation and emulation are transforming the nature of cultural memory and history.”
—Trevor Owens, Chief Research Officer, American Institute of Physics; author of The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation and After Disruption

“Computing Legacies places simulation at the center of digital culture. It is a must-read for anyone interested in what happens when we humans seek help from computers to grasp what is happening around us.”
—Henry Lowood, Harold C. Hohbach Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections, Stanford University

“This invaluable book illuminates how computers came to be mirror worlds for doubling and troubling our deepest mathematical, scientific, and cultural assumptions about what we know and how we know it.”
—Stefan Helmreich, author of Silicon Second NaturePeter Krapp is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also affiliated with the departments of English, Music, and Informatics.