Category: Uncategorized

Corinna Schlombs. “Built on the Hands of Women: Data, Automation, and Gender in West Germany’s Financial Industry” Technology and Culture 64, no. 1 (January 2023): 63-89. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.0002.

“Built on the Hands of Women” explores the topic of data entry which has been neglected in the history of computing. Though under-explored, achieving efficient, large scale data entry was a pressing concern in the early days of mainframe business computing, and continues to be important today. Schlombs’ detailed research consists of two in-depth case studies of different approaches taken by German finance companies to address this issue. Allianz insurance company adopted a technological solution, while Sparkassen savings bank went for a sociotechnical approach. Utilizing detailed archival sources Schlombs explores the implications of these differing tactics focusing particularly on the consequences for the female workforce employed for data entry. The cases are firmly situated in the social, political, and economic climate of midcentury post-war Germany.

The article offers an outstanding critique of labour relations and in particular establishes that white-collar work can have a real physical impact on employees, even down to the food they are provided with. The technological details of the development of equipment used for data entry are well positioned in the broader international literature. Schlombs draws on novel archival materials demonstrating expert use of sources in English and German. She offers a carefully written detailed history which is highly original. Her research into data entry undercovers a crucial component of computing history which has been overlooked despite being an essential precondition for computerization. The research is transnational in perspective and opens up a generative area for future scholarship.

Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press: 2023).

Balkan Cyberia, Victor Petrov’s history of computing in Bulgaria during the Twentieth Century skillfully and engagingly operates across multiple registers of analysis – from global political economies to regional histories and from detailed stories of individual contributors to cultural history – and diverse geographies – from cities and towns in Bulgaria itself to the “Second World” of Soviet-centered economies to India, Japan, and computing centers in the West. Petrov’s comprehensive approach to his central question, “Why did Bulgaria become such a predominant center for computer production in the decades between 1950 and 1990?” includes a detailed and nuanced account of the role of industrial espionage as industrial policy, an upacking of the complex political economy of what he calls the “Second World” of Soviet-centered economies, and rich accounts of how that political economy shaped interchanges and developments in Bulgarian computing with Japan and India. The result is a global history that both enriches our understandings of computing in multiple geographies, and shows the exciting potential for further studies in this mold.

Nominations are now open for the 2024 Mahoney Prize. The deadline is April 15, 2024.

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

Nominations are now open for the 2024 Computer History Museum Prize. The deadline is April 15, 2024.

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

Winner: Kevin Driscoll, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).  

 

“How did the internet become social ?” is a question of great importance to experts and students, historians and digital ethnographers, as well as practitioners, new and old alike. Kevin Driscoll’s The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media is both a remarkably engaging story of computer-mediated networks in North America of the 1980s and an inquiry into the founding mythology of the internet, emphasizing the inadequacy of origin narratives that exclude hobbyist communities, thereby expelling the roles of bottom-up innovation, informal trust, and intrinsic motivations behind the technologies of sociability. The committee was greatly impressed by the book’s emphasis on the multiplicity of the historical experiences of early cyberspace composed of interconnecting dial up systems, each featuring idiosyncratic cultures, community-building ethics, and technical designs, as well as by the author’s exemplary handling of partial and heterogeneous sources, a real methodological tool kit for the future studies of the post-1980s computing. Effectively blending social, cultural, and technical approaches to the histories and practices of the online community building, The Modem World is particularly sensitive to treating diversity – race, gender, geography – in both the presences and the absences, and offers an insightful and important connection to today’s concerns about living in/with social media. 

Winner: Hannah Zeavin. “‘This Is Womenspace’: USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983–86.” Technology and Culture 63, no. 3 (July 13, 2022): 634–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2022.0104.

The 2023 Mahoney Prize Committee would like to thank all of the authors who submitted a paper for consideration. We enjoyed reading, discussing, and re-reading this exciting collection of work. As an indication of the state of the field, this was a thrilling year to serve on the committee. The submitted work demonstrated technical rigor, methodological innovation, nuanced argumentation, and substantive engagement with other fields and disciplines. They addressed urgent questions concerning political and economic power, memory and archives, gender and identity, art and computing, transnational perspectives, personhood, and the meaning of failure. The authors engaged computing and information technology as potential tools and sources as well as the objects of historical inquiry.

This year’s award goes to Hannah Zeavin for “‘This Is Womenspace’: USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983–86,” published in Technology & Culture in 2022. Dr. Zeavin is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science in the Department of History and The Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. She is also the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021).

“This Is Womenspace” explores discussions of gender and the experiences of women in the online world of the early 1980s. Through a detailed analysis of archived posts from two USENET newsgroups, Zeavin offers a nuanced account of a period of transition in both internet history and women’s history in the US. Her research demonstrates how participants in these nascent forums explored the possibilities and limits of this new conferencing technology while also contending with gendered expectations about who and what “the Net” would be for. Zeavin argues that the women of USENET drew from a longer tradition of feminist activism and organizing in response to harassment and misogyny on the network. Her archival research reveals continuities between face-to-face Consciousness-Raising Groups of 1970s and struggles to create online space for women in the 1980s. In detailing these efforts, Zeavin’s paper also offers an historical perspective on fundamental concerns in computer-mediated communication concerning anonymity, agency, community infrastructure, and moderation. In addition to these substantial contributions to internet history and feminist media studies, the jury was especially sensitive to Zeavin’s creative handling of born-digital archival materials. She provides an exciting methodological model for future research in early online communities.

Nominations are now open for the 2023 Computer History Museum Prize. The deadline is April 30, 2023.

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

Winner:

 

Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press, 2021)

 

Citation:

 

Elegant and thorough, Image Objects was both enjoyable to read and exciting to engage with. The committee was particularly impressed by Jacob Gaboury’s extensive range of methodological tools, each revealing a different aspect of what he astutely describes as a “phenomenal invisibility of computer graphics.” The judges found especially compelling the book’s arguments regarding the materiality of computation—arguments that the author points out are resistant to “revolutionary” narratives of computing history. With its carefully crafted assemblage of chapters, each focusing on a technical artifact of choice—an algorithm, an interface, an object standard, a programming paradigm, and a hardware platform the book’s intellectual goals embody, and will certainly further catalyze, the interdisciplinary dialogues of the SIGCIS community.

 

About the CHM Prize:

The Computer History Museum Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding book in the history of computing broadly conceived, published during the prior three years. The prize of $1,000 is awarded by SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society. SIGCIS is part of the Society for the History of Technology. In 2012 the prize was endowed in perpetuity through a generous bequest from the estate of Paul Baran, a legendary computer innovator and entrepreneur best known for his work to develop and promote the packet switching approach on which modern networks are built. Baran was a longtime supporter of work on the history of information technology and named the prize to celebrate the contributions of the Computer History Museum to that field.

 

 

Winner:

 

Theodora Vardouli and David Theodore, “Walking Instead of Working: Space Allocation, Automatic Architecture, and the Abstraction of Hospital Labor,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 6-17, 1 April-June 2021. Prize

 

Citation:

 

The paper which is awarded the Mahoney Prize this year was published in 2021 in IEEE Annals of The History of Computing and co-authored by Theodora Vardouli and David Theodore from McGill University in Montréal. Vardouli is an Assistant Professor and Theodore is the Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Health, and Computation, both at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal.

 

Their article investigates the relationship between computing and architecture by studying an algorithm that was used for floor layout design in postwar British hospitals. The algorithm, by Whitehead and Eldars, relied on string-diagram studies that described the pattern and volume of movement of people in a typical hospital. By studying this algorithm—the debates over, adaptation of, and use of Whitehead and Eldars’ approach—the authors situate the automation of hospital design at the intersection of building science and healthcare management. Of greatinterest is the fact that, through the topic of space allocation, Vardouli and Theodore aim to present “a parallel story in which researchers promoted the adoption of computers to manage hospital labor by intervening on the activities of the laborers through the hospital building itself: not through computer terminals, but through the architecture.” As they conclude, looking at the long-term consequences of computer technology for architecture: “matching activity patterns to spatial patterns as a method of designing architecture with computers persists.” Their historical study, which strongly benefits from their ability to conduct research at the nexus of design and computation, clearly contributes to a better understanding of the operational implications of algorithmic techniques, as well as showing the impact of computer technology on fields not often discussed in computer history.

 

About the Mahoney Prize:

The Mahoney Prize recognizes an outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology, broadly conceived. The Mahoney Prize commemorates the late Princeton scholar Michael S. Mahoney, whose profound contributions to the history of computing came from his many articles and book chapters. The prize consists of a $500 award and a certificate. The Mahoney Prize is awarded by the Special Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) and is presented during the annual meeting of our parent group, the Society for the History of Technology.

 

 

There’s some terrific computer & information history events scheduled for the SHOT annual meeting in New Orleans, coming soon on November 10-13, 2022. Here’s an overview of the meeting; there’s three elements in particular that you should check out: 

1. On Friday Nov 11 we’ll have the “SIGCIS Business Lunch,” which will be a great opportunity to catch up. This also will be the venue for our much-anticipated SIGCIS Book Auction, where we’ll have a variety of recent and ‘classic’ volumes on hand, ready to go to the highest bidder. All proceeds go to SIGCIS travel awards and initiatives for improving accessibility and inclusivity for our SIGCIS conferences.

2. There are no SIGCIS-sponsored panels at SHOT this year, but, my goodness, there are more fascinating papers and panels than I can handle. The draft program (NB: link leads to a Word .docx) has all the details. The good stuff includes Friday panels on Surveillance (session F8); Writing and Code (F15); the “New” or “Knowledge” Economy (F17); Logistics in Computing (F24); authors from the new book Abstractions & Embodiments (F32); Telegraphy (S12); Personal Computing (S24)… and much more! Please take a look at the program; and if you can’t travel to NOLA, note that some panels will be streamed, and you can access them by registering for the “Hybrid Only” option.

3. On Sunday November 13, the return of the in-person SIGCIS Conference! This year’s theme is “Under Construction,” featuring a keynote by Lilly Irani, presentations of the Computer History Museum Prize and Mahoney Prize, and over 2 dozen papers, including some tasty morsels from the wonderful and kind souls on the SIGCIS mailing list. No hybrid option is available for the Sunday conference, but we are already working on our next SIGCIS meeting in Fall 2023 which will be exclusively online. We hope to see you in New Orleans!