Category: Uncategorized

Honghong Tinn, Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2025).

The CHM Prize Committee awards the 2026 prize to Honghong Tinn’s Island Tinkerers: Innovation and transformation in the making of Taiwan’s computing industry.

The committee members were impressed by the groundbreaking history contained within the pages of Island Tinkerers. This book is ambitious in scope and detailed in its analysis. Island Tinkerers skillfully explains how visions and practices of development and innovation transformed Taiwan, and along the way powerfully changed the history of computing since the Cold War. Tinn’s multi-sited research reassembles the gendered networks of technologists and labor needed to make computers into viable technologies. Modulating across multiple scales of inquiry, the book engages deeply with insights from East Asian studies, transnational American Studies, computer history, and STS, offering unique case studies that are as thoughtful about the personalities and desires of individual actors as they are about the development and economic goals of nations. A model for its depth and breadth, Dr. Tinn’s Island Tinkerers will make a major impact on computing history and scholarship on the history of technology in the years to come.

We’ll be having a casual get together at the virtual SHOT meeting, on Sunday Oct 25.

Boston 9:00-12:00pm · London 12:00-15:00pm · Tokyo 10:00pm-01:00am

If you’re attending SHOT, come hang out with us and get to know other SIGCIS members! (Note: we’re unlikely to use all 3 hours, so please join near the start time.)

Verónica Uribe del Águila, “Making Innovation in the Mexican Silicon Valley: The Early Years of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (1981–2001),” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 46, no. 2 (April-June 2024): 24-37.

Verónica Uribe del Águila’s article “Making Innovation in the Mexican Silicon Valley: The Early Years of El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (1981–2001)” masterfully de-centres the history of computing from its typical focus on Europe and North America, while simultaneously charting the global and globalizing influence of Silicon Valley’s ideologies and work practice. Professor Uribe del Águila’s work highlights the power of “innovation” discourse as an avatar for anti-labour and anti-local business practices: Guadalajara’s El Centro de Tecnología de Semiconductores (CTS), in the Jalisco IT cluster known as the “Mexican Silicon Valley, was initially intended to support domestic digital innovation, but ultimately became a vehicle for neoliberal knowledge and value transfer from Mexico to the United States. Uribe del Águila’s masterful synthesis of business, labor, and institutional histories provides a sterling example of how the computing industry has reshaped the world to its own needs, with Mexican white-collar workers one of the many groups who have suffered as a result. This is powerful and highly topical historical scholarship, and the committee extends its heartfelt congratulations.

Nominations are now open for the 2026 Mahoney Prize. Please find all instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize

Nominations are now open for the 2026 Computer History Museum Prize. Please find all instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/chmprize.

Theodora Dryer, “Settler Computing: Water Algorithms and the Equitable Apportionment Doctrine on the Colorado River, 1950–1990” Osiris 38 (2023): 265-285.

Following a careful review of submissions, we are proud to announce the awarding
of the 2025 Mahoney prize for outstanding article in the history of computing and
information technology to Theodora Dryer for Settler Computing: Water Algorithms
and the Equitable Apportionment Doctrine on the Colorado River, 1950–1990. In this
article Dryer demonstrates how the legal denial of Native American Water rights
coincides with the establishment of algorithmic systems driven by a colonial
approach to space and time termed settler computing. Settler computing, as a
concept, showcases the insight the history of computing and information technology
can provide to longstanding and urgent social struggles. It is a reminder that
colonialism is far from over and that water allocation and distribution systems can be
understood as material, infrastructural, and systemic forms of settler-colonial power.

In addition to providing a theoretical contribution to research on the temporal and
spatial extension of settler colonialism, Settler Computing: Water Algorithms and the
Equitable Apportionment Doctrine on the Colorado River, 1950–1990 is unique from
a methodological perspective. Dryer’s analysis of linear programming algorithms
designed to quantify and monetize abstract conceptions of ‘western water’ is clear
and concise without sacrificing technical insight, connecting the optimization of ‘least
cost’ water use for agricultural production to the gatekeeping of water data and the
erasure of indigenous rights.

In closing, the committee would like to thank everyone who submitted an article for
consideration. The quality of research was high, and the scoring was close.

Avery Dame Griff, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023)

The CHM prize committee awards this year’s prize to Avery Dame-Griff for The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023). The committee lauds Dame-Griff’s fascinating and nuanced study on a topic of critical importance to both the history of technology and the history of US social change in the 20th and 21st centuries. Dame-Griff skillfully argues that the “two revolutions” of trans political visibility and online community-building were inextricably linked—and shows how the technological affordances of the internet enabled and altered aspects of trans community, identity, and political organizing offline as well as online. Dame-Griff’s impressive use of different kinds of historical sources, and ability to also read against the archive and its silences, is a model for histories of computing that must consider the power relations inherent in modern technologies. The Two Revolutions promises to be a foundational work both for students of the history of computing and those studying the history of trans rights.

SIGCIS 2025 virtual meeting abstract submission deadline is THIS MON, 7/14 (extended)! This year’s theme is POWER SURGE, featuring keynote speaker Lily Geismer. Panel papers and grad student WIP workshop submission welcome. Details and CFP here: https://meetings.sigcis.org/

Nominations are now open for the 2025 Mahoney Prize. The deadline is April 15, 2025.

See full instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize

Nominations are now open for the 2025 Computer History Museum Prize. The deadline is April 30, 2025.

See full instructions here: https://www.sigcis.org/chmprize.