Donate to Programming Historian today!

December 3, 2016

The Programming Historian is People

Adam Crymble

Heatmap of Contributors to The Programming Historian since launch. Map produced using Google Fusion Tables.

It sounds cheesy, but projects like the Programming Historian don’t exist without people freely giving their time, energy, and passion. Part of our sustainability plan has always been to ensure the project wasn’t reliant upon grant funding, and that means we’ve had to work hard to entice volunteers to sustain our efforts. To ensure our relationship was mutually beneficial rather than one-way, we’ve always tried to make sure contributors were properly credited for their efforts.

Since we launched in July 2012, we’ve done our best to keep track of everyone who has been part of the project. That includes authors, project team members, reviewers, and contributors to our blog. We’ve done a pretty good job of that (though I realise that we only have a list of reviewer names in lessons that eventually were accepted for publication and not those that didn’t make it through peer review).

Our growing list includes 112 people in at least 13 countries, on 3 continents. Most of them are associated with universities in one way or another. We have 73 universities represented amongst our contributors. Predominantly our contributors are academics, graduate students, or people working in university libraries, but there are also those who work for scholarly societies, freelance scholars, designers, consultants, and even someone working for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Heatmap of North American Contributors to The Programming Historian since launch. Map produced using Google Fusion Tables.

We owe a huge debt of thanks in particular to George Mason University (9 contributors), Western University (6), University of California Los Angeles (5), the British Library (3), Carleton University (3), Rice University (3), and the University of New Mexico (3).

33 of our contributors are women, and 79 are men. We’re committed to diversity, so we’ll continue to work towards bringing those numbers closer to parity. To help us do that, please encourage female colleagues, friends, and students to consider proposing a tutorial. If you are a woman with an idea for a lesson, we’d be very happy to hear from you.

Heatmap of European Contributors to *The Programming Historian* since launch. Map produced using Google Fusion Tables.

The breakdown of contributors by country:

The maps show that we’ve done a great job of bringing people together across North America and the UK, but there’s clearly more work to be done to ensure the Programming Historian becomes a truly global community. We hope that our new (and hard at work) Spanish language team will help us grow the project in Central and South America.

If anyone has African, Asian, or Australasian connections that would like to get involved, please encourage them to drop us a line.

A big thanks to everyone who has made this project possible thus far. The Programming Historian is people. We’re truly grateful of all of you.

Heatmap of British Contributors to The Programming Historian since launch. Map produced using Google Fusion Tables.

Our contributors to date:

If I’ve missed you or made a mistake, let me know so I can update our records.

About the author

Adam Crymble, University College London.