Reading Note G: Ada Lovelace and the Clerical Labor of Codework

This article examines human-machine co-authorship as it represented by Ada Lovelace in her famous translation of and appendices to L. F. Menabrea’s Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage. Lovelace's translation notes and correspondence with Charles Babbage are read alongside the Engine itself, as a platform, and the histories of calculating engines, software development, and nineteenth-century clerical labor. Inspired by critical code studies, the article performs a close reading of what is today referred to as the first computer program, a sequence of steps that Lovelace adds to her translation’s final Note G as an example of something the Engine can do. Ultimately, the article argues that the gendered power structures of collaborative work in Lovelace’s time — and the challenges women authors faced in the nineteenth century more broadly — influenced understandings of machine programming, and that Lovelace’s representation of the human-machine relationship in the first programmable calculating machine complicates the organizational structures of both clerical labor and software design.