SEARCHING ADA

Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the accomplishments of women in the fields of technology and science. Ada was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. She was born in December 10th, 1815. At age 20, she took her husband’s family name and the title of countess, becoming the Countess of Lovelace, Mrs. Augusta Ada King. And with the name Ada Lovelace, she embarked in Western history as the first computer programmer – not only the first female programmer, but actually the first human programmer.

For nine months, between 1842 and 1843, Lovelace worked on algorithms that could calculate Bernoulli’s sequence utilizing the analytic machine of Charles Babbage. Nevertheless, in spite of her importance in the current digital world, Ada Lovelace is still unknown and underestimated, given that Babbage was long known as the sole inventor of the first calculating machine in history. With that in mind, British journalist and activist Suw Charman-Anderson, founder of Open Rights Group – one of main British centers that fights for digital rights equality -, created last year, Ada Lovelace Day, a web action that consists in having Ada’s enthusiasts (mostly women) write, on their websites and blogs, posts dedicated to the pioneer of computing and sciences.

Although the date revolves around the emblematic figure of Ada Lovelace – who became an essential character in the feminist fights that concentrate on the issue of asymmetries regarding the access to technology -, the leading figure of the Ada Lovelace Day is its own founder, Suw Charman-Anderson. Personifying the principles expressed by the cyberfeminist pamphlets of the 1990s and the early 2000s, Susan – or Suw, as she became known – is a role model. Not only due to her efforts and actions for equality in regard to digital cultural access and rights, but also due to her breaking into scientific journalism, a field dominated by men. Suw faced a double struggle: before experiencing the rough and rigid writing of scientific texts, she earned a Geology degree by the University of Cardiff, specializing in an even more gender-exclusive area.

After graduating, she turned her career towards scientific research; nonetheless, without leaving journalism aside, Charman-Anderson wrote Biology articles. And since every good path must include detours, shortcuts, and digressions, she added to her resume the possibility of diversity, by developing, at that same time, a Radiohead fanzine, which led her to working as a collaborator of Melody Maker magazine for two years, writing pieces on geek culture and music. Her diverse activities took her, subsequently, to the blogosphere, where she became known for her intimate Chocolate and Vodka, and for the weblog centered on digital culture and new media Strange Attractor. Susan integrated the first wave of independent journalists that added editorial and opinion functions to blogs, replacing its initial “Dear Diary” attribution, quite common during the initial phase of the Internet tool (late 1990s and early 2000s). Susan’s success as a digital agitator and as a Social Softwares consultant led her to work for companies like MSN and BBC Online, and to creating, in 2005, the Open Rights Group, one of the most important British centers for digital rights. ORG also counts with the support of other important ciberactivism personalities, such as Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow and British Journalist Danny O’Brien.

The context of Suw’s introduction in the digital world cannot be left aside. Around the 1990s and early 2000s, a new feminism was gathering strength, pleading for female presence in the electronic communication networks, given that the number of women involved with professions related to technology and information science was far inferior to the number of men involved with the same activities. Nowadays, the proportional share of women dedicating themselves to some areas of the internet is quite bigger. An example is a research made by the website InformationIsBeautiful.net; utilizing the Google Ad Planner tool, which provides details on the web’s main addresses (except for some Google services), the website proved that women currently represent the majority of users of social network services. From the 17 websites included in the research, 12 have a wider female user quota. Facebook, for instance, is dominated by 57% of female users. 55% of Flickr’s users are women. On MySpace, the female predominance is rated at 64%, whilst on Hi5, women represent 54% of the public. Nonetheless, issues related to ways of stimulating the involvement in the context of communication technologies, or how to make the learning of distribution codes more attractive to women, as well as the access and process of informational technologies are still relevant, and should be even more encouraged. “Using” the web is not enough; we should also be able to subvert it and read in between its lines, so that we can gain free access to its structures and power speeches.

Suw Charman-Anderson’s trajectory inspires us even though it has taken place in a different social-political context. So, how should we think about women-and-networking in the Brazilian context? How can we make those efforts known? Those are some of the questions that make us wonder. In 2010, Ada Lovelace Day will, once again, be celebrated on March 24, but this time it comes with a different purpose in Brazil. The event will be just an excuse to make the issues discussed throughout this text result in new experiences regarding gender, creativity and tecno-science expression, reaching distances far beyond the memory of Ada Lovelace.

BR.ADA, an experimental collective that seeks for a feminist tecno-artistic experience for Brazilian and Latin American women, finds inspiration in the actions of Suw Charman-Anderson, and of many other women from this same field, to initiate its activities, which aim to celebrate and to present, to the Brazilian public, the different realities and female experiences within the digital world. In the collective’s blog, you can follow and participate in this investigation in a territory that, albeit incipient in Brazil, is increasingly gaining more space due to the massive female presence in the digital and tecno-scientifical networks.

BR.ADA

Paulo Mendel

Curators

The collective BR.ADA is formed by Anaisa Franco, Lilian Campesato, Nina Gazire, Vanessa de Michelis and Vivian Caccuri.

translation           Isabela Alzuguir

thanks to Mark Fisher | Nina Power | Marisa Jahn | Silvia Hayashi | Laura Faerman | Liliana Tal | Giorgio Ronna | Mariana Abasolo | Made-Up Disease | Felipe Meres | Lisa Foti-Straus | Suw Charman-Anderson | e todos os inscritos

São Paulo, Brazil | 2010