Each group should submit a proposal for their project history by Friday, November 7 at 5pm. The proposal should give us a detailed sense for what work you expect to do in the next month before these are due. It should be 3-4 pages, single spaced. Part of the point of this exercise is to enable us to help you get these projects focused and on track, so tell us anything you feel we need to know, or anything you’d like help with.

The proposal should cover the following (not necessarily in this order):

1. Research conducted so far – list people interviewed, books, patents, archives, videos, etc. Include an evaluation of the sources (e.g. "XX’s account has great detail but it shows only the junior engineer’s view, it misses the big picture," or "document XX sheds light on the early thinking but it was written to impress investors so it may not be entirely representative"). Have you found some key documents which crystallize the salient issues? (i.e. a business plan, a memo, a distribution list, a proposal, etc.) How do these accounts of the technology vary? Remember, you cannot rely on a single source for the history.
2. Relationship to context – list secondary sources that give background, context for the technology (e.g. What other types of encryption were there? What other kinds of AI machines were people building? Who was this project competing against? What was happening at MIT at the time? Why was the government interested in technology X?)
3. Research to be done – documents you’re going to examine, people yet to be interviewed, people you’d like to interview if you can find them. Documents you’d like our help to locate or interpret.
4. Identify a facilitator who will serve for the rest of the term to make sure things get pulled together.
5. Focus of the project history – How will you narrow down the large topics we’ve assigned (RSA, TMC, AGC, etc.) into questions you can pose, analyze, and answer in your final paper? An example might be "We choose not to focus on the company overall, but on the engineering decision involving the design of Product X" or "We are looking at the political difficulties encountered during the project due to the decision to take a radical new approach to designing the X." See framing questions below.
6. Framing questions and thesis– These are the high level intellectual questions from which you will develop a thesis. The thesis will make your project history more than just a story about company X (local interest) but a story about engineering and how new technologies develop (global interest). As part of this process, you should bring in the ideas we discussed in regard to the readings earlier in the course.

Example framing questions might be:

What happens when a technological trajectory is interrupted by a business failure?

How do Tom West’s technical management techniques (e.g. signing up, pinball, etc.) compare to those of XX?

When is it not a good idea to black box a technology?

How has the need to determine "firsts" distorted the history?

What kinds of new skills did this technology require? Who actually built it?

How was success defined and who got to define it?

How does the controversy over XX reveal the important issues at stake?

How did the engineers at XX deal with uncertainty?

Was the founder of company XX doing heterogeneous engineering?

How did XX convince others to trust the new technology?

What convinced XX to trust it in the first place?

How did the engineering team make their new technology acceptable?

How did XX build a company, a new technology, and a new product simultaneously?

Can you characterize the corporate culture at XX?

Did participants argue that the technology was following a "natural trajectory" in order to get their new ideas accepted? Did it follow that trajectory in the end?

Who defined the line between "technical" and "non-technical" for what purposes?

Did XX use the rhetoric of "invention" to sell an old idea?

 

7. Preliminary Outline – take a shot at laying out how you’ll tell the story; it can be useful for identifying areas in which you need to know more. Take a look at MacKenzie, Vincenti, Kidder, or other "histories" and see how they do it.