Right now, machine learning is at the heart of many conversations because of Open AI’s ChatGPT, a large language model whose most recent version also addresses images. The responses to ChatGPT have varied widely because knowledge about machine learning is uneven. To understand machine learning, it’s helpful to go back to the beginning. Where did this technology begin and how? What were the early applications? James E. Dobson’s The Birth of Computer Vision takes up precisely those questions, through a specific frame: the development of technologies that enable a computer to “see.”

Today, we don’t need to look further than our phones for examples of computer vision technologies at work. Facial recognition and surveillance are hot topics. This book focuses on the development of these idea in the United States from the late 1950s through the late 1970s, analyzing the issues in a variety of ways. Dobson writes: “To tell the story of the development of computer vision, the ongoing debates and disagreements in the discourse of computer vision and machine learning, the algorithms themselves, the materiality of these algorithms and their implementations in specialized hardware, and the history of the labs, funding agencies, and researchers are all required.”

It may surprise you to learn that the author is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth. What does an English professor know about computers? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Dobson is a pioneer of what’s known as the digital humanities, a movement to apply theoretical and cultural criticism to the study of technologies, the creation of new forms of reading and theorizing texts as well as the creation of new texts through computational interventions. Dobson’s thinking is broad but he gets specific, helping the reader understand the fundamental concepts that the book builds on.

Dobson writes: “The approach that I take in this book might be considered a specialized and specific form of the history of ideas or intellectual history. Algorithms, as this book will argue, are primarily ideas. Created and programmed in software and/or hardware, they are artifacts shaped by the material and historical contingencies of their moment of genesis. But at their core, they are abstract conceptualizations of problem-solving tasks.”

If you’re looking for an intellectual history that will help you think through the technologies that shape and change the way we see, how we see and what we see, get this book right away. The official publication date is April 4th but it’s available for pre-order now.

Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover. [Editor’s note: She and James Dobson, the subject of this Enthusiasm, are married.]