Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Shaoling Ma,  Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University, who will discuss the computerization of Southeast Asia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

There has been no comprehensive history of computerization in Southeast Asia between the 1950s and the 1980s, and my talk will offer some explanations as to why this is not a bad thing. To tell a history of computerization in any geopolitical region is to simultaneously conceive of the computerization of the region, that is, of how the classification, imaging, and prediction of human-natural-and-machine systems increasingly shape actionable and optimizable knowledge of its peoples, and natural and built environments. In the case of Southeast Asia, a critical assessment of such a history shows how accounts written during this period cast the region as the receiving end of foreign hardware technologies and know-how, or as a resource frontier for the collection of environmental, demographic, agricultural, industrial, and other “raw” data, is still only a story half-told. At stake is to go further in grasping how such developmentalist histories inadvertently and invaluably theorize the roles that political states, economies, and cultures play in the growing, global perception of software as hardware- and machine-independent, an ideology that made it possible to position local Southeast Asian communities as part of a computational, planetary order. Conceived as preliminary notes—referencing the “training data” in my title—drawn from what can only be a non-totalizing project, this talk will highlight select computer applications in the fields of education and consulting, environmental sensing, and agricultural and land informatics. By examining how universities, states, and consultancy firms rationalize software development as national self-reliance; how a 1977 Final Report on Computer Processing of Remote Sensing Data prepared by the Asian Institute of Technology for the Committee for Coordination of Investigations of the Lower Mekong Basin interpret and retrain data from LANDSAT satellite imageries; and the language of modern, informatics management in the Malaysian Rubber Industries Development Authority’s implementation of a computer support system, I hope to show how these anecdotes, partial and eclectic as they are, paradoxically commit to thinking of Southeast Asia on a large, abstract, and reflexive scale.

About the Speaker

Shaoling Ma is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese history, literature, and media in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021), and is currently working on a second book manuscript on a theory and cultural history of computational environments in East and Southeast Asia. She serves as Book Review Editor (film/media studies/drama) for MCLC: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.