Lydia Jessup

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Lydia is a creative + public interest technologist working at the intersection of urban space, tech + design. Her work ranges from interactive data visualizations, to a community board radio, to speculative VR waiting rooms. She thinks a lot about the affordances of civic spaces and is currently re-imagining bus stops using machine learning. She is a master’s student at NYU ITP and former policy wonk and economist. She previously studied international relations at Tufts and worked for four years in public policy research at the UChicago Urban Labs and in Peru at Innovations for Poverty Action.

Tour

Feminist History of the Internet Walking Tour with Emma Rae Norton

This tour aims to put women back into the narrative of computing and internet history. We’ll use 721 Broadway, the location of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) as a launching pad for our tour that will lead us on an adventure full of pre-browser chatrooms, e-magazines distributed on floppy discs, hypertext conferences and the first computer generated art and music. We’ll discuss how the women pioneers behind these technologies have influenced the computers and internet we use today as well as the impact they have had on digital culture. By hearing stories and visiting sites involved in the development of the internet in NYC, this tour aims to be an expansion on the dominant narrative in history and part of a larger history that is still left out.

The Tour itinerary is below. This takes about 2.5-3 hours and is 4-5 miles of walking. Please see our attached summary and map for more details.

• Location 1: ITP, Red Burns + media studies
• Location 2: @Cafe, location of Webgrrls meetings and one of NYC’s first internet cafes
• Location 3: Metrobeat Office + Silicon Alley ecosystem overview
• Location 4: ECHO, one of first “social networks” online (BBS)
• Location 5: Bell Labs, World’s Fair 1964 and modern day School for Poetic Computation
• Location 6: Google + the history of hypertext

We were inspired to create this tour after reading Broad Band by Claire Evans.

It is advised to bring with you on the tour: Good walking shoes, proper attire for weather elements (hat/umbrella/sunglasses etc), camera or note pad if desired

Additional information

• Map Close Up