Video: Yes, this vocodery song about Ada Lovelace, the pioneering computer programmer, will totally get stuck in your head. But it’s totally worth it, because everyone should think about Ada Lovelace more.
We wrote here about how Ada Lovelace developed the first computer program, but in a nutshell, she became fascinated with Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, and published a series of “notes” on programming it — which Alan Turing used as the template for some of the first computer programs nearly 100 years later.
The above song was created to help promote Ordinary Women, a project that Feminist Frequency is doing to create short videos about Lovelace, alongside other pioneering women who haven’t gotten their props in mainstream culture. These women include Murasaki Shikibu, Ida B. Wells, Ching Shih and Emma Goldman. They’re raising money here, and they still have a lot of money left to raise with under two days left.
They have posted a bunch of these super-short music videos about the women they’re hoping to feature. My favourite, though, is the Doubleclicks celebrating Emma Goldman in just 15 seconds: