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Description
In the course of the “industrialization” (Galison 1997) of high-energy physics during the 1950s and beyond, the evaluation of vast quantities of experimentally produced photographs was initially delegated to untrained women. However, their “practices of seeing” (Schürmann 2008) were soon identified as the economic and epistemic bottleneck of the experimental process — a barrier that was to be overcome through computerized automation.
Internationally, as well as at the Hamburg accelerator (DESY) in West Germany, significant potential was seen in the flying spot scanner. Within this media network, the so-called Hough Powell Device (HPD) and its associated computer systems were designed to take over complex pattern recognition tasks, effectively automating the extraction of significant signatures from the data background.
Although this “digital” system—viewed by Peter Galison as a precursor to Artificial Intelligence — aimed to standardize data analysis, it remained deeply entangled with local, gendered practices and specific conditions of knowledge production. Based on archival research, oral history interviews, and re-enactments, this paper investigates the epistemic, practical, and technical dimensions of these local knowledge practices within the “HPD logic” (Lingjaerde 1962). It specifically explores how the shift toward automated pattern recognition reconfigured gendered labor and challenged traditional notions of scientific objectivity in the production of experimental data.