Dr. Yoehan Oh, a co-organizer of the Asian Americans and STEM initiative at Yale, is teaching again an interdisciplinary undergarduate class, Decentering Computer Science: Transpacific Computing History across U.S., East Asia, and Beyond, this Spring 2025 semester. In its second run, the interdisciplinary course stays true to its original aims to widen the typical narrative of computer science history that focuses on the United States and look at the transpacific relations in computing across the East Asian countries, the U.S., and the Asian diasporas in North America and beyond.
This semester, students are tasked with, in addition to their regular problem sets and final essays, the Wikipedia Assignment throughout its dedicated WikiEdu dashboard. Through this high-impact assignment, students will identify under-developed Wikipedia articles about computing in the Asian, Asia-Pacific, and Asian American contexts, find reliable sources, organize them into a coherent and accessible writing, and critically assess their peer’s contribution. This assignment will culminate at the reflection essays where students can sharpen there understanding of how public-domain knowledge like Wikipedia may represent a few specific connections and versions of narratives and perspectives, and how those public knowledge may improve to be more robust, more comprehensive, and more reliable.