Sally’s Helpers – a distributed lament

For the web residency »Tools for Citation,« Anisha Baid explores the history of feminized computer labor by creating a collaborative online compositional space using typing gestures and reflecting on forgotten footnotes of interface history. The web-based project will invoke an embodied and multisensory practice of computation as citation for contemporary interface design.

Anisha Baid, India — Feb. 4, 2025

Mrs Hope Simmons at the 1857 Francis typewriter on exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum on July 18, 1928.

Sally’s Helpers – a distributed lament by Anisha Baid will be a web-based text editor and a tool for rethinking citation as an embodied, multisensory practice. Rooted in Baid’s performance Sally’s Helper, this project interrogates the feminized history of computer labor, drawing on the story of Sally, an office secretary »model user« at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. By archiving moments of innovation in typing – from early typewriter prototypes like the Francis Typewriter (modeled on a child’s piano) to typing aids like Mavis Beacon – this platform positions citations as live annotations in the history of human-machine interaction.

The software will act as a collaborative compositional space, transforming keystrokes into piano notes and creating a sonic score alongside textual output. Appearing as a web-based text editor, the program will produce a piano note for every keystroke the user enters, followed by the text output. Visual and design elements will focus the writer’s attention on rhythms, pace, and pauses within the writing process. This tool invites users to cite through gesture, sound, and sensation, building a living archive that questions what it means to cite histories, bodies, and machines while foregrounding the interplay between text and labor. During the web residency, Baid wants to design this web program and create a framework for interaction to produce a distributed lament, a score for figures like Sally, lost in the footnotes and annotations of interface history.

The web project will be presented as a web-based text editor that produces a piano note for each keystroke alongside text output. Rooted in a footnote about Sally, the first model user, this platform rethinks computer work as an embodied practice.

Copyrights: The text and image on this page – unless no other rights holders are expressly named – are published under the terms of the »Creative Commons Attribution« – License CC BY-NC-ND Version 4.0: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/