About

Janet Abbate is a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and serves as co-director of the graduate program of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society in Northern Virginia. Her work focuses on the history, culture, and policy issues of the internet and computing. She authored the book Inventing the Internet (MIT Press, 1999), which has become the standard reference on the history of the Internet. Her book Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (MIT Press, 2012) explores how gender has shaped computing and discusses how the experiences of female pioneers can inform current efforts to broaden participation in science and technology. She also co-edited Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure (MIT Press, 1995). Her current research investigates the historical emergence of computer science as an intellectual discipline, an academic institution, and a professional identity.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• World Wide Web
• Law
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Internet privacy
• Psychology
• Materials science
• Engineering
• Mechanical engineering

Selected publications

• How not to think about AI

  Metascience · 2026-02-04

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Technology and Culture

  VTechWorks (Virginia Tech) · 2025-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A book review of <i>Rendering History: The Women of ACM-W</i>. Edited by Gloria Childress Townsend. New York: ACM Books, 2024. Pp. 455.

  Publisher

• Introduction: (re)writing gender in Internet histories

  Internet Histories · 2025-02-04 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  This special issue aims to illuminate women’s contributions throughout history by using gender as a critical lens in internet historiography and challenging the dominance of male-centered narratives. In the introduction, we contextualize the socio-cultural moment in which this issue was conceived and outline its dual focus. First, we reconstruct women’s contributions to the history of the Internet. Second, we examine gender identity and the role of LGBTQ+ communities within this history. Our approach is guided by two perspectives: understanding gender identity as a site of political mobilization and situating the Internet within the broader digital world. We also advocate for future directions that emphasize decolonizing and expanding Internet historiography.

  PublisherDOI

• Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference

  Internet Histories · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  The co-editors of this special issue—Janet Abbate, Autumn Edwards, Leopoldina Fortunati, along with Valérie Schafer, a co-editor of the journal—launched an open call for organizing a roundtable during the SHOT 2023 conference, in which they invited scholars to delve deeper into the multifaceted sources, approaches, and methodologies related to Gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. This edited transcription of the roundtable presents historically situated examples of the sociological, cultural, and political aspects of the relationship between gender and the Internet. It endeavors to illuminate the shaping of this history, examining the construction of gender in the online sphere. The participants pose inquiries about addressing knowledge gaps in this history, exploring methods to trace gendered trajectories and controversies, leveraging oral histories, navigating silences and invisibility, and broadening the dissemination of findings to audiences beyond those already engaged. Beginning with Laine Nooney’s exploration of the videogames industry before connected and networked practices, the discussion progresses to Avery Dame-Griff and Cassius Adair, who both tackle the challenges of reconstructing and narrating the history of transgender people and their digital communication dynamics. These themes are also developed in Laine Nooney’s article “A Pedestal, A Table, A Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender and Video Game History” (2013), significantly contributing to the evolving dialogue on gender and video games, and Avery Dame-Griff’s recent book, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (2023). Lastly, Deena Larsen provides insights into present and future challenges concerning gender asymmetries and imbalances in Wikipedia, along with their implications for the development of artificial intelligence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ‘I wrote my first piece of code at seven’: women share highs and lows in computer science for Ada Lovelace Day

  Nature · 2023-10-10 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Popularizing the Internet

  2023-11-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Since the early 1970s the ARPANET and the Internet had included sites outside the United States; University College London had an ARPANET connection for research purposes, and ARPA’s Satellite Network linked the United States with a seismic monitoring center in Norway. The defense portion of the Internet also connected many overseas military bases. Before privatization, therefore, it was difficult to expand the Internet abroad by adding host sites to the US-run networks; connecting the Internet to networks in other countries was much more promising. By the mid-1970s, state-run networks were being built in a number of countries, including Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Networks outside the United States had few links to the Internet while it was under military control. But when the National Science Foundation set up its civilian NSFNET, foreign networks were able to establish connections to it, and thus to gain access to the rest of the Internet.

  PublisherDOI

• Abstractions and Embodiments

  Johns Hopkins University Press eBooks · 2022 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coding Is Not Empowerment

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2021 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• The Internet Challenge: Conflict and Compromise in Computer Networking

  CRC Press eBooks · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  The conflict that arose in the mid-1970s over computer networking standards provides a case study of the social and technical implications of standards debates. The conflict over competing networking standards reveals both conflicts of interest between the groups participating in computer networking and fundamental differences in their perceptions of the technology. Arguments over the need for a transport protocol stemmed from conflicting expectations about the demand for network services and preferences concerning the role of host computers. Instead, a compromise capability called &quot;fast select&quot; was instituted that allows users the option of faster connection set-up at slightly lower reliability. While the Open System Interconnection model provides a common framework for discussing protocols, it has so far failed to resolve conflicting approaches to networking. When large technological systems undergo change, the process often involves diverse actors, increasing the likelihood of conflict and incomprehension between different groups.

  PublisherDOI

• Joy Lisi Rankin. A People’s History of Computing in the United States.

  The American Historical Review · 2020-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Historiography of computing has evolved from a focus on inventors and technical milestones to a deeper engagement with computer users, practices, and cultures. Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States continues this trend, highlighting user practices to challenge a hardware-centric account of the origins of online sociality. Rankin argues against a “Silicon Valley Mythology” that the invention of microcomputers in the 1970s and internet-based social media in the 1990s were the necessary preconditions for personal and social computing, a myth that “creates a digital America dependent on the work of a handful of male tech geniuses” (3). She asserts that “personal computing”—the ability of people to access, create, and form communities around computer resources—existed in the 1960s and 1970s, long before “personal computers” or the internet. To make her case, she documents innovative educational experiments in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, locales not popularly associated with digital culture. Her detailed examples demonstrate how networked sociality arose not just from the actions of a few heroic inventors but from the collaboration of thousands of ordinary students and teachers.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Fifty Years of Women in Computing

  NSF · $147k · 2000–2003

Frequent coauthors

• James W. Cortada

  10 shared

• Nathan Ensmenger

  Indiana University

  10 shared

• George K. Thiruvathukal

  9 shared

• Ulf Hashagen

  Deutsches Museum

  9 shared

• Marie Hicks

  Tokyo University of Science

  9 shared

• K. W. Smillie

  Tokyo University of Science

  9 shared

• William Aspray

  9 shared

• Michael Rabinovich

  9 shared

Labs

• Department of Science, Technology, and SocietyPI

Education

• Ph.D., Communication

  University of California, San Diego

  1992

• M.A., Communication

  University of California, San Diego

  1988

• B.A., Communication

  University of California, San Diego

  1985