Every reading set for the course, in one list, with a sentence on why each one is here.
Eight sources carry twelve weeks. A short list, read closely and returned to, rather than a long one skimmed once. Every entry below is linked from at least one week page — this list exists so you can find a reading again, not so you can browse it cold.
- Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press.
- The source of "tacit knowledge" itself. Every distinction the course draws between a capability and its record traces back to this book.
- Collins, H. M. (1974). "The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks." Science Studies, 4(2), 165–185.
- The laser nobody could build from the published papers alone. The paper this course cites most, because its argument is broader than its one case.
- Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Monthly Review Press.
- Deskilling as a management decision, argued at length, decades before "automation" was the word anyone used for it.
- Zuboff, S. (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. Basic Books.
- The same technology that removes a capability from the people who held it can also demand a new one from them — argued from years inside the workplaces it changed.
- Bainbridge, L. (1983). "Ironies of Automation." Automatica, 19(6), 775–779.
- Six pages that explain why the most reliable automation produces the least practised operator — read by more disciplines than wrote it.
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2008). Nuclear Weapons: NNSA Needs to Establish a Cost and Schedule Baseline for Modernizing Its Uranium Processing Capabilities (GAO-08-593).
- The official record behind FOGBANK, at the level this course is allowed to discuss it: institutional and financial, not material.
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "F-1 Rocket Engine" (collection object A19700271000).
- The museum hardware itself — the object later engineers examined when the drawings alone weren't enough.