Curation Project

The Digitization of Calculators

When beginning the project I was stumped on what kind of technology to examine. I wanted to stray away from a technology I’ve known my whole life, music streaming for example, so I wanted to delve into one that has a long history. My first thought was weapons, something as old as time and always rapidly advancing. I decided against it for two reasons, the topic had too large of a scope and modern weaponry is something I don’t necessarily approve of, in most contexts. Left again without an idea the idea to study calculators came while I was watching a documentary on coding that mentioned the early invention of the abacus. With that in mind, I did some preliminary research on what the path was from an abacus to the super calculators available on every smartphone on the market. After that research, I had a list of the different calculators through time and narrowed it down to the most important inventions, and made sure they were thoroughly divided throughout eras. Initially, I arranged my photos in a normal 3×2 grid but I didn’t think it was interesting enough so I added a series of lines to make it looks like the grid on a standard calculator. I thought this would add an extra visual element to appeal to the viewer. Next, I added captions to explain what the objects where if it wasn’t obvious and dates to explain the cultural shifts in the meantime. With an understanding of my design choices it’s important to understand why the development of calculators is important. The invention of the abacus was a landmark moment in history, it was a machine that allowed a greater number of people to utilize and understand mathematics. This is no different than how the modern calculator found on an iPhone allows a greater number of people to utilize and understand mathematics. While the inventions are separated by numerous centuries the benefit to society remains the exact same and this holds true for every evolution in between them as well. This project focuses on the use of public domain and calculators throughout history are a perfect representation of that. No one owns math, the ideas and concepts in the world are yours to use, or discover and the calculator has been a tool to do so since the invention of the abacus all the way up until modern scientific calculators.

Citations:

“Attempt at a portrait 2” by Falashad is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Publicdomainpictures.net: License: CC0 Public Domain

“Slide Rule 3” by lamcs52 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“Tate arithmometer, 1900. | Science Museum Group Collection” is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA NULL

“eniac” by bdu is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0“Big library calculator” by mwphillips75 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0