SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY MUSEUM

New Partnership Illuminates Hidden Record of NASA’s Human Computers

By partnering with Margot Lee Shetterly and the Human Computer Project, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum is shining a light on the women whose contributions at NASA have been hidden in data and records.

A black and white photo of Katherine Johnson sitting at a desk in front of a typewriter and open notebook.
NASA research mathematician Katherine Johnson is photographed at her desk at Langley Research Center in 1966. Johnson made critical technical contributions during her career of 33 years, which included calculating the trajectory of the 1961 flight of Alan Shepard. Image courtesy of NASA.

There can be no denying that mathematician Katherine Johnson, the NASA human computer who helped John Glenn be the first person to orbit Earth, was exceptional. However, she was not an exception. That’s what Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly wants us to know.

Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia. Her father worked at NASA. She personally knew women who also worked there. Yet, she was surprised at just how many more women there were at NASA. “The broader story is that these were not outliers,” remarks Shetterly regarding Johnson and the other three main characters in her book. “There were so many other women…of all backgrounds. Women who had come to work at what would become NASA [between] the 1930s to the 1980s, and who hadn’t really been accounted for.”(1)

Shetterly originally brought the stories of four Black women in computing at NASA to light in her groundbreaking book, Hidden Figures. Inspired by the additional stories she uncovered while researching the book, she launched the Human Computer Project, an initiative aimed at documenting the unaccounted stories of women who worked in computing at what would become NASA between 1930 and 1980.

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A team of women, who were around since JPL’s beginnings in 1936 and who were known as computers, were responsible for the number-crunching of launch windows, trajectories, fuel consumption and other details that helped make the U.S. space program a success. Image courtesy of NASA.

The impact of these women extends beyond space. They fundamentally changed the American workplace and American history. Making these women discoverable is Shetterly’s goal.

Challenges to Discoverability

Discoverability can be defined as the ability to find a person, place, or thing that you don’t know exists. It’s a question of not only how much digging is required but also of whether we know where to dig and how easily we understand what we find. Often, women’s contributions have been recorded in ways that are not easily findable or identifiable. Improving the discoverability of women’s history is the focus of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s Discoverability Lab.

Ironically, the ordinariness of the women’s stories at the center of the Human Computer Project contributes to the challenge of finding them. As Shetterly explains, “This is not about people who are famous, who are well known, or who would in any way in their time period have merited anything other than the normal collection of HR data.” In fact, while readers and even Hollywood found Shetterly’s narrative of the human computers fascinating, the women’s reality was much less glamorous. “Most computers were designated as lower paid ‘subprofessionals,’” Shetterly recounts on page five of Hidden Figures.

Adding to the challenge, the current work of locating and collecting information on these women is largely a manual process. That is because very few records about the women of NASA have been converted to a digital format. Instead, according to Shetterly, these stories are often spread across multiple sources, most of which are still in their original paper format, “like church programs, like yearbooks, like college records…like boxes that have been gathering dust in the National Archives for…more than a century in some cases.” Of the few that have been scanned, most exist as digital images of text and are not machine-readable. Without the ability to electronically access information, as Shetterly puts it, “the logistics are daunting.”

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An unnamed computer plotting compressor data in the Engine Research Building at the NACA’s Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory. Image courtesy of NASA.

Putting each woman’s story together means first learning how and where details about these workers are stored. It means developing systems, processes, and workflows to search those places. It means, says Shetterly, “asking for help.”

Discoverability Is a ‘We’ Problem

Collaboration is key to making the history of women in computing discoverable. In the summer of 2024, the Human Computer Project partnered with the Smithsonian American Women’s Museum and the University of Virginia to develop the Human Computer Project internship program. The interns learned about the different programs within NASA and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and they recovered more women’s names as they dug into the history of aeronautics and space as told by these women. Working together created a synergy that helped to drive the work forward in a thrilling way.

The interns’ discoveries confirmed what Shetterly already suspected: “What it showed is just that there were so many women doing this work…. And that's just the NASA women. We know that women did this work at Bell Labs, at the Naval Research Laboratory, at all these other organizations where there was highly structured scientific and engineering work being done.” Describing the outcome as both exciting and overwhelming, Shetterly concludes, “It's the kind of problem you want to have.”

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Staff photograph taken August 15, 1956. Mary W. Jackson (bottom right) began at Langley in 1951 as a computer. She was later assigned to work at the 4-Foot by 4-Foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel where she worked with Kazimierz “Kaz” Czarnecki, who encouraged her to become an engineer. To attend the university extension engineering classes held at the then all-white Hampton High School, Jackson was required to petition the courts, which she did successfully. Image courtesy of NASA.

In 2025, the Human Computer Project will once again partner with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. Originating from a longstanding friendship between Shetterly and Melanie Adams, the museum’s former interim director, the collaboration feels like a natural fit. With its goal to historically contextualize women in computing, the Human Computer Project aligns perfectly with the museum’s mission and the focus of the Discoverability Lab. “I love the idea of a partnership with an organization that is dedicated to telling American women's stories and really understanding that it's a fusion of all these things…. It's capital H, American History,” says Shetterly.

It will take a huge amount of effort and collaboration to fully uncover this part of history. In addition to the records held at NASA and other organizations, Shetterly pinpoints the people in the communities where these women lived as another crucial source: “The grandchildren, the great grandchildren, the former colleagues, the people who sang with them in the church choir but didn't necessarily know what they were doing but can put the pictures together.” Locating those people and piecing the stories together, for Shetterly, “make it both a challenging and a really satisfying project.”

The Narratives Behind the Numbers

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Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures (2016) and founder of the Human Computer Project. Image courtesy of Margot Lee Shetterly.

The Human Computer Project exemplifies how data and personal stories can work in tandem. Shetterly finds narratives valuable in helping us to understand the people who did the work and how their lives have a bearing in shaping us–the things that we're interested in, what we study, what we pursue or don’t. But, while a story might be about one woman, Shetterly notes, datasets reveal trends and patterns in the lives of 5,000 women. What was the most frequently occurring bachelor's degree that they earned, and how did that change over time? Were there similarities between institutions? Was it the government, private industry, or academia that offered women the greatest opportunity for advancement? Intriguing insights can be found in the details about each woman, but historical trends and patterns can be discovered through the power of largescale data sets.

A dataset in the making, the Human Computer Project will serve as a rich digital record of these women’s lives. A dataset is a tool for organizing and collecting information generated through research. It might contain fields like name, occupation, age, or years of service that can be populated with information on each of the women found. Computational tools as well as machine learning and other AI tools can analyze the information stored in datasets to discover and share insights that broaden our understanding of these women’s impact on American society and lead to further discovery. For Shetterly, the Human Computer Project represents “the marriage of storytelling and data analysis.”

As the Human Computer Project looks to collect more stories of “women sitting in rooms doing math,” Shetterly reminds us that the important stories are not just about the famous or the powerful. “Everybody's got a story,” she affirms. The key to discovering them? “Curiosity.”

Notes:

  1. Unless otherwise noted, the quotes in this blog post come from an interview with Margot Shetterly conducted over Zoom by Summer Hamilton on January 14, 2025.

Further Reading

Summer L. Hamilton, PhD, is the Digital Community Partnerships Specialist for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum