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Timothy Lenoir: Back to the Future

New technology specialist wants to help future historians

Timothy Lenoir joins Duke as the new Kimberly Jenkins Professor of New Technologies and Society.

Timothy Lenoir is in all places at once. As new media and technologies move forward, he is looking back at where they came from. And forward, to where they are going. And forward, to those people who will someday be looking back.

This is the conundrum of a historian of science and technology researching a field that is furiously expanding and recreating itself.

"I considered myself more of a historian, but in the 1990s I shifted my attention to contemporary science and the implications for society, " he said.

Lenoir, who spent last year at Duke as a visiting professor, recently became the Kimberly J. Jenkins Professor of New Technologies and Society. His interests range from the challenges of recording the history of fast-moving technological breakthroughs to notions of truth, identity and personality on the Internet to how medical technology is changing our idea of the human body.

Last spring, he taught a course called "BodyWorks: Medicine, Technology, and the Body in Early 21st Century America, " which examined how organ transplantation, genetic engineering, computer-aided tomography, molecular and DNA computing and other new medical technologies have changed our notion of the body.

He 's planning a course for next semester on "information archaeology" how to study technological innovation when the material may be inaccessible now.

"How do we do research on this in the future? " he said. "I think we really need this new discussion of information archaeology. "

This problem came home to him while developing a website on the work of Douglas C. Engelbart, the Silicon Valley pioneer credited with such pivotal inventions as the computer mouse, pointer cursor, on-screen windows and hypertext links.

"Engelbart 's breakthrough was an online system, but its record was in hundreds of boxes of old perforated computer paper, " Lenoir said. "I looked at it and said, 'This is insane! Why don 't we run the old system from the 1960s? ' When we're talking about a revolutionary idea, it 's important for people to see what it looked like and what it was like to use. "

Lenoir said preserving such old research environments is expensive and technically difficult, often requiring current technology to emulate defunct operating systems and hardware. The MouseSite was forced to rely on a few old videos for a glimpse of Engelbart 's system in use, Lenoir said.

While at Stanford, Lenoir and colleague Casey Alt developed new techniques to capture the essential records of contemporary scientific breakthroughs lest they vanish along with discarded computers and obsolete storage media.

One tool is software for collective authoring of timelines and genealogies to show relationships among researchers and ideas.

"When we interviewed people for a history of bioinformatics, they drew timelines to remind them of things, " Lenoir said. "I 'd seen that before, so I thought why not give scientists the user interface they seem to like? "

The interactive bioinformatics archive did something no paper archive can do, said Alt, now administrative director of the Information Science and Information Studies program at Duke.

"Historians could have a working dialogue with the scientists they were trying to study, " Alt said. "This interactive, self-documenting approach creates new opportunities for future historians to think about. "

Lenoir also is working on a new project that could be used by working scientists.

"People want to address novel ethical issues in genetics as they come up, not after they 've created a company, " Lenoir said. "So we 're developing a 'bench-side consultation module ' to notify researchers of precedents related to the words they enter. " The system can "conference in " experts on ethics and law, capture video of discussions and enable participants to annotate and discuss the video, Lenoir said.

And the historian in him can't help but be excited about another possible use for this system.

"Of course, this process also leaves a fascinating record, " Lenoir said.