In this 1965 photograph, a woman encodes data into a Hollerith card machine. The data creation process began with a clerk—often a woman, as this kind of technical work was typically carried out by women working at lower wages—who produced data by manually punching holes into small cards. When enough cards had been punched, they would be fed to a Hollerith card reader, which summarized the data.
When D.R.F. Taylor created the Computer Atlas of Kenya, he used a program called SYMAP, developed at Harvard’s Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis (LCGSA) in the 1960s. Early computer mapping programs like this were often written in a programming language called FORTRAN, which required data to be input from physical punched cards (some examples of which are displayed in Transforming Tools). Betty Benson was responsible for the actual programming of SYMAP, though Howard Fisher is frequently given credit for its creation. At this time, women played central roles in computerized map production, though their work was frequently ignored or acknowledged only in passing. In the Computer Atlas of Kenya, Taylor thanks “Mrs. Susan Richer” for her assistance “in programming and data processing.”