Originally published in the ebook A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention.

by Bill Thompson

The renowned computer scientist Karen Spärck Jones died in 2007, aged only seventy-one. Her husband Roger Needham, another computer scientist who she’d married in 1958, had died of cancer in 2003 shortly after his sixty-eighth birthday. I wrote her obituary for The Times, as I’d written Roger’s four years earlier. I’d written an obituary for their colleague David Wheeler in 2004, and already had Maurice Wilkes’ on file, though it wasn’t needed until 2010 as he lived to be ninety-seven.

Although writing obituaries was never a full-time occupation, as a technology journalist with a computing degree I was regularly commissioned by The Times to cover well-known figures in the computing industry or computer science, and these four clearly merited coverage in “the paper of record”. After all, Spärck Jones, Needham, Wheeler and Wilkes had been key members of the generation that created modern computing and shaped the world we live in today, and it was important to reflect on their careers: without their achievements in the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory I think it unlikely that the world of computing would have the shape it does today.

I also wanted to mark their passing because the four of them were also my teachers. I’d studied for the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge, and they had all been teaching or working in the Lab. Writing an obituary of someone you know is very different from pulling someone’s life together from a quick clippings job and a few short chats with family and colleagues. I had known all of them, spent time in their presence, had to defend my views to them — with more or less success. I’d watched them as they lectured on their own work, and had to face the occupational hazard of writing an essay on a topic knowing that it would be assessed by the person who had actually made the theoretical breakthrough you were discussing.

I completed my one-year Diploma in 1984, and Karen was one of the few senior women in the Lab at the time. I discovered later that she didn’t have a full-time position for many years, and relied on short-term research contracts to fund her work. Despite this, Karen’s academic career was impressive: She published nine books and over two hundred substantial papers; she served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994; and she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995.

Karen was a research fellow at Newnham College from 1965 to 1968, a Fellow of Darwin College from 1968 to 1980, and became a Fellow of Wolfson College in 2000, becoming an Honorary Fellow in 2002. In 2007 she was awarded the Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society and was the first woman to receive it. She was also given the Allan Newell Award and Athena Lectureship by the American Association for Computing Machinery. She is not only one of the most significant women in computing, she is simply one of the most important people in computing.

Not all words are equal

Karen’s interest in language may have had a lot to do with her intellectual development, but it was also a matter of luck, as it is for most of us. Karen was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, in 1935 and after attending a local grammar school she came up to Girton College, Cambridge in 1953 to read history. After her degree she studied philosophy, or Moral Sciences as it was called at the time, for a year.

After a brief and unsatisfying spell teaching she was invited to join the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) by its director Margaret Masterman following an introduction from Roger Needham, a friend from undergraduate days who was studying for a PhD in what was then called the Mathematical Laboratory but is now the Computer Laboratory.

CLRU was working on natural language processing, looking at how computers could determine the meaning of sentences. Masterman, reflecting Wittgenstein’s philosophy, believed that meaning not grammar was the key to understanding languages and wanted to explore how machines could be programmed to implement this approach. For her part, Karen decided to try to build a thesaurus automatically, which meant transcribing the whole of Roget’s Thesaurus onto punched cards and working closely with Needham on ways to classify information automatically.

She married Needham in 1958, and obtained her doctorate in 1964. Her thesis, published as Synonymy and semantic classification, remains important even today.

In the 1960s she began working in the field of information retrieval, and in 1968 she moved from CLRU to the Computer Laboratory where she stayed.

You could say that Karen’s work made Google and Siri possible, if you were writing headlines for The Daily Mail and wanted to overstate a complicated chain of causality. She was, after all, a pioneer in information retrieval and natural language processing and her contributions helped lay the ground in which the seeds of modern search engines and speech recognition were planted.

For example she pointed out that not all words were equal when searching a text and, in her 1972 paper A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval, argued that not all hits should be weighted equally as the occurrence of keywords that are broadly distributed throughout the texts being searched matters less than the occurrence of terms that appear in few documents. Her work on information retrieval underpinned the development of search long before the web made it a vital area for research and product development.

While Needham and Spärck Jones both remained at Cambridge University after their marriage Needham rapidly obtained a tenured position and eventually became head of the Computer Lab while Spärck Jones had to rely on short-term research grants to fund her work until she was awarded a personal professorship in 1999. This was not a very stable existence. The grants had to have a principal investigator from the department, but Karen was funded as a Senior Research Associate and was not, technically, a member of the faculty. At least things seem a little easier now for distinguished computer scientists like Wendy Hall.

In October last year Stuart Schieber wrote a post about Karen for Ada Lovelace Day, noting that she was “a leader in my own field of computational linguistics, a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics” and expressing his happiness that “because we shared a research field, I had the honour of knowing Karen and the pleasure of meeting her on many occasions at ACL meetings.”

Connected through computing

I can’t claim such intimacy, and I doubt that Karen ever noticed me in my days as postgraduate student hanging around in the Titan Room, but I observed her very carefully. In the early 1980s I was very active in the Cambridge University Women’s Action Group and had founded a small society called Men Against Sexism, holding debates and screening films like Rosie the Riveter to groups of similarly minded people. There were only four or five women on the Diploma in Computer Science out of forty or so, and Karen was one of very few female lecturers in the Lab. So I noticed her.

I was also interested in her research. I’d come to computing after having studied first philosophy and experimental psychology, and her work in language processing was especially interesting in contrast to lectures on compiler design and operating system scheduling algorithms — it offered an opportunity for reflection on the way words worked that appealed to me after years studying Wittgenstein. It was only while reading up for her obituary that I was reminded that her first academic job was in the CLRU looking at how computers could determine the meaning of sentences, working for a former student of Wittgenstein, which probably explains why I found her work intriguing.

I worked in the computing industry in Cambridge for several years after I graduated, some of the time at Acorn Computers, and would spend time in the lab and see her around at seminars and lectures, and we would talk about her work. Later, as a freelance writer, I’d do occasional pieces for the Cambridge Alumnus Magazine, and have a reason to visit the library. I remember passing Karen on the stairs of the old Computer Laboratory when it was in the tower on Corn Exchange Street, or exchanging a few words with her over coffee outside the library when I was in there to research a newspaper article, by which time she was Professor of Computers and Information.

In 1999 the Lab celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, or EDSAC, one of the first stored program electronic computers. I was there for the celebratory events which Karen had organised with her usual efficiency. I had the opportunity to see her in action and also catch up with her and other old friends and teachers as we looked back over the achievements of the computing industry and reflected on how they had built on the work done in the lab since EDSAC ran its first programme.

A legacy assured, if unwritten

Since Karen’s death, the British Computer Society has inaugurated an annual lecture that honours women in computing research in her name alongside their regular Lovelace Colloquium for women undergraduates in computing and related subjects. Karen’s reputation, like that of other woman computing pioneers such as Grace Hopper, Anita Borg and Barbara Liskov, seems assured, at least within the profession.

This would almost certainly have pleased her. She once said, “My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men”, going on to note, “I think women bring a different perspective to computing; they are more thoughtful and less inclined to go straight for technical fixes.”

There isn’t a biography of Karen Spärck Jones, despite her many achievements in computer science and language processing or her remarkable life, but then again there aren’t very many biographies of the post-war generation of British computer scientists who defined the field and laid the groundwork for today’s information society, male or female.

While all may have merited obituaries in The Times neither Karen, nor her computer scientist husband Roger Needham, nor the inventor of the subroutine David Wheeler, nor even Maurice Wilkes, builder of EDSAC and director of the computer laboratory where Karen did much of her work, have biographies that I can find, perhaps because they came of age and did their work in a time before we were all so entranced by social network sites and smartphones. We may have to wait awhile for these pioneers to find biographers willing to engage with their lives and work, as we did for Babbage and Turing, or perhaps we’ll have transcended the book format and will make do with extended Wikipedia entries for such things.

But I hope that when these biographies come to be written they will encompass the lives and achievements of Karen and the other women who did so much to build the discipline of computer science, kickstart the computing industry and shape the modern world.

Further reading

Abbate, J (2001), “Karen Spärck Jones: An Interview Conducted by Janet Abbate”, IEEE History Center Oral History, http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones

Shieber, SM (2012), “For Ada Lovelace Day 2012: Karen Spärck Jones”, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/10/16/for-ada-lovelace-day-2012-karen-sparck-jones/

Spärck Jones, K (2007), “Karen Spärck Jones”, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/ksj21/

The Daily Telegraph (2007), “Karen Spärck Jones”, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1548315/Karen-Sparck-Jones.html

The Ada Project, “Pioneering Women in Computing Technology”, School Of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, http://www.women.cs.cmu.edu/ada/Resources/Women/

About the author

Bill Thompson has been working in, on and around the internet since 1984 and spends his time considering about the ways digital technologies are changing our world. A well-known technology journalist, he is Head of Partnership Development in the BBC’s Archive Development Group, building relationships with partners around ways to make archive material more accessible, and a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art.

During the 1990s Bill was Internet Ambassador for PIPEX, the UK’s first commercial ISP. He appears weekly on the BBC World Service’s Click, writes a column for Focus magazine and advises a range of arts and cultural organisations on their digital strategies. He is a member of the board of Writers’ Centre Norwich and of the Collections Trust, and was a Trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust. He also manages the Working for an MP website.

Web: thebillblog.com
Twitter: @billt

Originally published in the ebook A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention.

by Jessica Ball

Florence Bascom would have been a remarkable woman in any age, but in her own time she was an outstanding proponent of science and women’s place in it. The field of geology was in its infancy in the 19^th century, and Dr Bascom was a pioneer, not only in that she was a woman demanding a position among men, but also in her mastery of the foundational skills of petrography and crystallography, and her uncompromising standards for the geologists she trained and who succeeded her. As a woman pursuing geology for my own career, I find much in Florence Bascom to admire, and look on her as a kindred spirit in my own love of studying the Earth.

Bascom was born in 1862 and had a great advantage in her family: her parents had both studied at seminaries. Her mother, a schoolteacher, was active in women’s clubs and the newly growing feminist movement, and her father led an academic life, first as a professor of oratory and rhetoric at Williams College and then as president of the University of Wisconsin. Florence herself excelled in school and went on to attend Wisconsin while her father was president. By the time she graduated in 1884 she had added an impressive array of qualifications to her name, including a bachelor’s degrees in literature, arts, and natural science, which she then followed with a master’s in geology in 1887 (also at Wisconsin).

She was never afraid to speak up and demand what was due her, even as accounts that chronicled her accomplishments described her as “quiet and self-possessed, a woman who is reserved, of few words.” (This description is immediately followed by the writer suggesting that she is “apparently possessed of great determination, which, however, does not mar her general attractiveness” — an unfortunate trend of reporting which I still see today. As if appearance had anything to do with ability!) She managed, against the opposition of no one less than the president of Johns Hopkins University itself, to convince them to admit her to the school for advanced geological study. She was, however, denied the right to enrol as a regular student and was forced to take classes sitting behind a screen so she would not “distract” the male students!

Geological foundations

Her doctoral thesis, published in 1896 by the United States Geological Survey, is as readable now as it was nearly 120 years ago. Indeed, it is still considered a foundational work of Appalachian geology. In it she corrected misconceptions created during earlier mapping in the South Mountain area of Pennsylvania — the very northern tip of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a province I grew familiar with in college. She used petrographic microscopy to establish the origins of the rocks there, a relatively new approach for geologists at the time. As it turns out, the rocks of South Mountain are not sedimentary as previous workers had proposed, but are metamorphosed rhyolites and basalts, a distinction which she points out rather caustically at times. My favourite phrase refers to some sloppy structural interpretations made by her predecessors:

“This section shows stratified rocks lying in a series of anticlinal flexures, which accord rather with Professor Rogers’s conception of ‘rock waves’ than with his observed dips. The dips are, without a single exception, to the southeast.”

Through Dr Bascom’s work on South Mountain, we learned a great deal about the truly ancient volcanic history of the eastern United States, particularly the later-named Catoctin metabasalt and one of the only occurrences of rhyolite on this side of the country.

Florence Bascom had a life of firsts: first female PhD at Johns Hopkins in 1893 (though not the first female geology PhD in the United States – that distinction went to Mary Holmes in 1888), first female research scientist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), one of the first female fellows of the Geological Society of America, and the first female vice president of the organisation. Some have even described her as the first woman geologist in the United States, although that is untrue, but she is probably the most famous of the first practicing women geologists. She also founded the geology department at Bryn Mawr College and taught there for more than thirty years.

In an era when women were frowned upon simply for donning short skirts to ride bicycles, Dr Bascom spent a great deal of her time in the field, doing all the hiking and schlepping and sampling that her male colleagues did, and in a high-necked gown to boot! She was an expert in crystallography, mineralogy, and petrography, which (particularly in the case of crystallography and petrology) were still young branches of geology in her time. During her PhD research and her time working for the USGS, she became an expert on the crystalline rocks of the Appalachians as well as Piedmont geomorphology, and published more than 40 papers on everything from the provenance of the South Mountain volcanics to clarifications of geomorphologic terms.

The importance of networks

Aside from the short book The Stone Lady, which I have leaned on heavily for this biography, it is difficult to find many accounts of Florence Bascom which describe her accomplishments on their own terms rather than linked with famous male names of the day. When she is described as a pioneer of the then newly-developed petrography methods, it is with a reference to her teacher George Huntington Williams; when she took a leave from her position at Bryn Mawr to learn crystallography in Germany, her name is overshadowed by Victor Goldschmidt, in whose laboratory she worked. Granted, this particular memoir was published in 1946, but it would have been nice to know more about Dr Bascom without always leaning on the prestige of her teachers, however worthy they were of acclaim.

My teachers and academic advisors have certainly been an integral part of my geologic life, but I don’t define myself by their accomplishments. However, Clary and Wandersee, in their 2007 article about Dr Bascom, argue that she would not have been able to make the inroads on the field of geology without taking advantage of her male contacts, which is definitely an important point to remember, especially for those of us who have been lucky enough not to have to fight for the right to do what we love. And as many of us know, networking is a good way to find opportunities and advance a career. That Florence Bascom engaged in it is surely a sign of a canny and capable scientist.

Florence Bascom’s biographers also make a point of emphasising how important her mentoring and teaching were for women in geology in the twentieth century. The geology program she began at Bryn Mawr became internationally known and praised. She wasn’t shy about expressing her pleasure in this accomplishment and those of her students and in a letter to Professor Hermann Fairchild, she remarked, “I have considerable pride in the fact that some of the best work done in geology today by women, ranking with that done by men, has been done by my students… these are all notable young women who will be a credit to the science of geology.”

Her students trained in the field and laboratory as well as in the lecture hall, and learned petrography from a wide array of geological specimens and thin sections that Dr Bascom collected from over many donors. Her courses were tough, and she held her students to high standards – and any young geologist who has ever struggled through a tough lecture and come out with a better understanding of the topic should know to thank their instructor for being so uncompromising!

The woman behind the science

The accomplishments I’ve mentioned would be a credit to any geologist – but they don’t give us a very good idea of what Florence Bascom was like personally. Her biographers were careful, however, to describe the woman behind the science. In fact, their accounts could, with a few tweaks, describe just about any woman in geology today:

• She loved animals and spent her spare time riding her horse Fantasy around various campuses and her retirement home in Massachusetts.
• She was by all accounts an unaccomplished cook, and anyone visiting her could expect to be fed canned soup and dry cereal.
• She bicycled to work and wore divided skirts – then more than a bit scandalous – to do it.
• She loved semiprecious stones and jewellery made with them, and would often buy pieces for herself and her students.
• She cut her hair short and often didn’t bother styling it.
• Her students described her as a sound teacher, “uncompromising in her standards of scholarship”, and said that she “expected of her students clear and honest thinking, not by precept so much as by example”.
• She was a very hard worker. According to one biographer, she “belonged to a rapidly vanishing time when a young field geologist…was expected to be in the field by seven in the morning, not to return under ordinary circumstances until six o’clock at night, subsequently to devote the evening to drafting and map work.” Eleanora Bliss Knopf, one of her former students, remembers being firmly rebuked for suggesting a later start time for the sake of a more leisurely breakfast!

In fact, barring the cooking, the bicycling and the short hair, this could well be a description of me. I dote on my cat, I have a collection of jewellery that never fails to start geologic conversations, and I once spent time riding horses myself. My own geology professors also instilled in me the love of concise writing and an early start in the field — getting up to start work at seven was par for the course on our field trips! Like Florence Bascom, I tend to be reserved and listen more often than I speak, and I suppose that can make me seem just as shy as she was supposed to have been.

But personal habits aside, Florence Bascom is the kind of geologist I would love to grow up to be. By all accounts she was intensely dedicated to her work and held it to the highest standards of quality and rigour. Her own words are enough to inspire any scientist: of her professional life, she said, “This is the life, to plunge into the welcome isolation of the field, to return to the stimulating association of Bryn Mawr, to observe and in part to clear up geologic phenomena, to return to the exposition and interpretation of geologic phenomena.”

And again, “The selection of work in which one delights, and a diligent adherence to it, are the main ingredients of success.”

In my opinion, she had it right – that to be really happy with your career, you should spend it doing something that you love.

Smoother sailing

Compared to Florence Bascom, my path through a geological career has been smooth sailing. My parents were every bit as supportive as hers, but they were not raising me in an era when the primary occupations women were expected to take up were marriage and motherhood. I did not have to sit behind a screen while completing my graduate coursework so as to not disturb my male classmates. I don’t have to fight with my school to be awarded my degree simply because I identify with a particular gender. I don’t have to deal with people judging me first by my appearance and second by my accomplishments — at least, not in print or to my face. I have not had to prove that I am ‘worthy’ to learn and work alongside my male colleagues; we have all had to prove that we are worthy of our degrees by our intellectual merits alone.

I’ve been surrounded by supportive people from the start — my parents, my undergraduate professors who treated everyone equally, and my graduate professors who did the same, my academic advisors who led by example and never questioned my goals. Florence Bascom had her supporters as well, but there were far more people who challenged her right to pursue her dream. I have not faced the same kinds of challenges she did, but it’s just as important to me to acknowledge that she and others have struggled for their rights, and will again. I am grateful that Dr Bascom forged a path for women in a profession that has taken many years to embrace them.

One final quote from a letter of Dr Bascom’s strikes me deeply as a scientist and a geologist: “The fascination of any search after truth lies not in the attainment, which at best is found to be very relative, but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed in the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds a joy that is beyond expression in ‘sounding the abyss of science’ and the secrets in the infinite mind.”

I think that any geologist — any scientist — would agree, that as much of the joy in our work lies in the search for answers as finding them. Otherwise, why would we continue? Certainly there is satisfaction to be found in solving a geologic puzzle once, but Florence Bascom does a wonderful job of describing why we make careers of repeating the quest for knowledge about the Earth. It’s a sentiment I want to carry with me throughout my own career, and I think that any woman, geologist or not, could find a worthy role model in the woman who spoke it.

Further reading

Clary, RM and Wandersee, JH (2007), “Great Expectations: Florence Bascom (1842-1945) and the education of early US women geologists”, Geological Society of London, Special Publications 281,123-135.

Ogilvie, IH (1945), “Obituary: Florence Bascom, 1862-1945”, Science 102(2648), 320-321.

Knopf, EB (1945), “Memorial of Florence Bascom”, American Mineralogist 31, 168-172.

Bascom, F (1896), “The ancient volcanic rocks of South Mountain, Pennsylvania”, Bulletin of the United States Geological Survey 136, 124.

Bascom, F (1931), “Geomorphic Nomenclature”, Science 74(1911), 172-173.

Schneiderman, JS (1997), “A Life of Firsts: Florence Bascom”, GSA Today 7, 8-9.

About the author

Jessica Ball is an active geoblogger who has been writing the Magma Cum Laude geoblog for almost 6 years. She is currently completing her doctoral degree at SUNY Buffalo, focusing on volcanic hazards and using a variety of techniques answer questions about where and why water-related lava dome collapses occur. Previously, she received her BS in Geology from the College of William & Mary in 2007, and worked from 2007-2008 as the Outreach and Education Assistant at the American Geosciences Institute. Like Florence Bascom, she spent some of her formative years waking up early to do field work in the Appalachians, loves semiprecious stones in her jewellery and strives to be a clear and concise writer. She tweets from @tuff_cookie about volcanoes, geology and good geologic puns.

Web: blogs.agu.org/magmacumlaude
Twitter: @tuff_cookie