Common law graduate student Ghazaleh Jerban clearly remembers the first time she saw the artifact that would become the focus of her fellowship research. “This big frame of intricately woven delicate wires,” as she describes it, at Ottawa’s Canada Science and Technology Museum stopped her in her tracks.
Jerban is one of two 2018 graduate student recipients of the new Ingenium-uOttawa Fellowship in Gender, Science and Technology. Both she and recipient Jennifer Thivierge, a PhD student in history, were awarded access to the Ingenium museum collections to research their public history projects and gain heritage and curatorial work experience.
“I didn’t know what the piece was but at the moment I felt like it might be it,” said Jerban, a fourth-year PhD student, recalling the moment she discovered a “core memory plane” in the museum’s warehouse while investigating artifacts with her fellowship supervisor, Anna Adamek, director of the museum’s curatorial division. Sometimes called core memory or core, this early form of computer memory was widely used until the mid-1970s.