[WEB4LIB] Re: "Imagining the Internet" predictions database

[Lars Aronsson]

Sloan, Bernie wrote:
> The preface to the list calls them the "200 people who were likely to
> have made predictive statements about the Internet in the early 1990s."
> In other words, people who were likely to have written or talked a lot
> about the Internet. The preface also refers to them as "Internet
> personalities".

If you were to look for the real Internet pioneers (in the 1970s and
1980s), I'm afraid it would be hard to find as many as 10 % who are
not white men.  How many IETF RFC authors are women, for example?  Or
colored?  Has anybody counted?  When did ARPA/DARPA or the NSF start
to require that funded projects are equal opportunity employers?

Go to www.ietf.org and click "gender issues".  Haha, just kidding.

Do indexing services like OCLC, Engineering Index or CiteSeer analyze
the gender or racial profiles of various branches of science?  Could
they?  Should they?

I'm painfully aware that when I'm digitizing engineering journals from
the 1870s ( http://runeberg.org/tektid/ ), I'm perpetuating the
historic male dominance in that field.  Should I just stop, and do
something else instead?  Should I limit myself to fashion magazines?
Or perhaps I make it easier for young women to cultivate an interest
in engineering by making these old journals more easily available?

As I deal in public domain works, I look for writers who died more
than 70 years ago.  Of the 97 Nordic Authors listed who died in 1934,
only 21 are women.  That's more than 10 percent, but it's far from
equal.  http://runeberg.org/search.pl?dead=1934


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/