%0 Journal Article
%T Review: The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: the (mostly) true story of the first computer, by Sydney Padua
%A James Sumner
%D 2015
%V 
%N Autumn 2015
%K Babbage
%K Comic
%K Computer
%K Lovelace
%K review
%K Sydney Padua
%X 
%Z And academically trained authors who have swum successfully in the pop market tend to agree, particularly when the footnotes are long or digressive. A popular analogy compares breaking off to read a footnote to going downstairs to answer the door whilst making love: see Fara, P, 2006 ‘Focus: The generalist vision in the history of science’, British Journal for the History of Science Viewpoint, issue 79, 12.

%Z The standard work on the history of the footnote is Grafton, A, 1997, The Footnote: a Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Grafton’s book does not discuss the use of footnotes by either of the two authors mentioned in the main text here, which renders the present footnote somewhat vague and unhelpful. There is a very funny joke about vague citation practice in the notes to Steven Shapin’s A Social History of Truth… somewhere.

%Z See in particular Higgitt, R, 16 October 2012, ‘Finding women in the history of science’, online at http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2012/oct/16/history-science; and 15 October 2013, ‘Women in science: a difficult history’, online at http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2013/oct/15/women-science-history-ada-lovelace-day.

%Z For accounts of real early female programmers, a good starting point is Abbate, J, 2012, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/lovelace-and-babbage/
%J Science Museum Group Journal