Computers in Swedish Society

Bang, the last file goes in the garbage can. That’s how I picture the late summer of 2007 when we at the Corporate Strategy Department move to Stureplan. Full digitization is what counts. I have no intention of riding there and back on the Hässelby–Stureplan metro just because I have forgotten a paper. Most of it is already thrown away, even if some documents were scanned. The 4-cm-thick evaluation study of the TIDAS project is also thrown away. That’s typical, just as I was asked to write some lines about it.

Above, the case has been made for the necessity of the project from a scholarly point of view. If we want to understand how computing changed the world, we need to address the users and the uses of computing technology, and therefore we need sources on these actors and processes. But besides these scholarly criteria, the project was also shaped by nonscholarly criteria. These may be divided into factors internal and external to the project. Among the internal factors that affected the outcome were the choice of organization, the participating parties (organizations as well as individuals), and the work process. Among the external were funding, conditions for grants, and, perhaps, most important, that the first generation of IT actors were getting old. In this section, the role of these factors in shaping the methodological approach and organization as well as the type of sources created and collected will be considered by giving an account of the history of the project.

In the first chapter of this book, I argued that if we want to understand how “computing has changed the world,” a more user-centered historiography of computing is needed. For this purpose, we need sources of those who used digital technology and how they used it. In the following chapter, I described and analyzed how we conducted a large-scale documentation project, which aimed to collect and create sources of the use of computers in Swedish society between 1950 and 1980. In this concluding chapter, I concentrate on a discussion of how the collection of oral history interviews and witness seminars, that form the core of our documentation efforts, can contribute to the Swedish historiography of computing. However, my intention is not to make a thorough analysis of this rich and comprehensive material. That formidable task I happily leave to other scholars and researchers. Here, my aim is rather to suggest how the collection can be used for addressing recent historiographical issues. I present three cases, using diverse examples from our collection, which each illustrates how oral evidence can inform us about the interaction of computing with large-scale transformations in economies, cultures, and societies. The first case deals with career patterns, social networks, and flows of knowledge, the second with users and uses of technology, and the third with the materiality and geography of computing. However, I will start out with a critical discussion on the interpretation of oral evidence.