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We’re very happy to announce the Conference Schedule for STORED IN MEMORY, the 10th Annual SIGCIS Conference to be held in St. Louis, Missouri on October 14, 2018. This conference will once again take place on the final day of the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.

STORED IN MEMORY will begin with a keynote address by Prof. Eden Medina, Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington. The conference features 31 papers by scholars from North America, South America, and Europe.

To register, please visit the SHOT Annual Meeting Registration website, where you have the option to register for the entire SHOT conference or the Sunday SIGCIS conference only. Please take a look at the program for the SHOT Annual Meeting itself, where you will see well over a dozen papers on computing and information history, as well as the traditional Friday SIGCIS lunch meeting.

Winner:

Elizabeth Petrick, Making Computers Accessible: Disability Rights and Digital Technology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

Prize Citation:

This is a groundbreaking book on an understudied topic in the history of computing. Petrick integrates histories of technology and civil rights and demonstrates the interaction of technological, social, and legal supports for accessibility. She uses disability studies frameworks to highlight how the shifting paradigms of “normality” and “universality” have shaped computer technology. She argues convincingly that principles of “universal design” that were aimed at making computers usable for the disabled significantly shaped the evolution of personal computer technology in general—thereby making the larger historiographic point that we can’t tell complete or accurate histories of computing without including (dis)ability as a factor. The book is clearly written and well-researched, with a helpful appendix on her sources and methods.

Prize Committee:

• Joy Rankin (2017 Chair), Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, 919 E. Shaw Ln. E-35, East Lansing, MI 48825, USA
• Janet Abbate, Dept. of Science, Technology and Society, Virginia Tech Northern Virginia Center, 7054 Haycock Road, Falls Church, VA 22043, USA
• Hallam Stevens, Room 1705, 7/F wenke Building, China Center for Special Economic Zone Research, Shenzhen University, Nanhai Avenue 3688, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, 518060

About the Computer History Museum Prize

 

Winner:

Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson. “’One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech.” Computational Culture (January 15, 2016). 

Prize Citation:

In “’One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech,” Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson provide a highly original and insightful history of PowerPoint’s design, development, and use.  They convincingly argue how PowerPoint has become a dominant and indispensable medium for communication, yet like many other forms of ubiquitous software programs and packages it has undergone minimal critical analysis.  As such, the conditioning of knowledge production with PowerPoint is overlooked, and once distinct situations and settings such as classrooms, press conferences, and church sermons become more alike.  Overall, their article stands out for astutely engaging with communication theory, as well as making significant IT history and historiographical contributions by analyzing PowerPoint within the context of precursor technologies such as the DuPont Chart Room, white boards, and overhead projectors.

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. For the 2017 prize, articles published in the preceding three years (2014, 2015, and 2016) are eligible for nomination. 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.

Previous winners:

2016: Andrew L. Russell and Valérie Schafer, “In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (October 2014): 880-907.

2015: David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerard Alberts, “When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960,” Technology and Culture 55 (January 2014): 40-75.

SIGCIS is pleased to announce its 2017 Conference: MEASURE, MODEL, MIX: COMPUTER AS INSTRUMENT.

The conference will be held on October 29, 2017 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, as part of the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.

The conference keynote speaker will be Joanna Radin from the Department of History at Yale University.

Measure, Model, Mix invites scholars and independent researchers across the disciplinary spectrum to explore the historical conditions of computation. The conference program is now available.

 

Command Lines: Software, Power, and Performance is a meeting that will draw together scholars from a variety of fields that study software. These fields include: the history of computing; science and technology studies; software studies; code studies; game studies; media studies; the study of women, gender and sexuality; studies of race, ethnicity and postcoloniality; and computer science and engineering. Command Lines is collaboratively organized by SIGCIS (Special Interest Group for Computing, Information and Society) and the Computer History Museum.

The Call for Papers is now closed. The meeting was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, on March 18-19, 2017, and the program and conference videos are now available.

 

Winner: Dinesh C. Sharma, The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution (MIT Press, 2015).

Prize Citation: Dinesh Sharma has written a highly accessible book on a significant topic – the history of computing in India – that is well-grounded in sources and interviews. The Outsourcer is full of fascinating stories on the beginnings of computing in India. Sharma does an excellent job contextualizing this story within broader Indian history and the history of computing in the West. Trained as a journalist, Sharma has produced a book that is both carefully researched and engaging to the reader. He regales and rewards readers with a great selection of anecdotes. The committee is pleased to award the 2016 Computer History Museum Prize to Dinesh C. Sharma for The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution.

The Outsourcer is available from MIT Press.

 

Winner: Andrew L. Russell and Valérie Schafer, “In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s,” Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (October 2014): 880-907.

Prize Citation: This paper expands our understanding of how networks emerged and evolved.  It contributed additional evidence of the international nature of ICTs, in this case, within France.  The paper is another example of the power of international collaboration among scholars.  It provides a meaningful narrative of a key piece of French networking history that has been understudied in a polished essay.

The essay is available via Project Muse

SHOT-SIGCIS Singapore Workshop 

June 26, 2016

“Convergence and Divergence”

The Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS) 2016 annual Workshop will be held on June 26, 2016. The workshop begins immediately after the regular annual meeting of our parent organization, the Society for the History of Technology in Singapore. 

 

FINAL SCHEDULE

9:00-10:30: All SIG Plenary – Ngee Ann Kong Si Auditorium, Education Resource Centre

 

11:00-11:15: SIGCIS 2016 Welcome – Seminar Room 2, Education Resource Centre

Jason Gallo, Science and Technology Policy Institute, USA and Ramesh Subramanian, Quinnipiac University & Yale University, USA

 

11:15-12:00: Keynote Address – Seminar Room 2, Education Resource Centre

Hadooping the Genome: The Impact of Big Data Tools on Biomedicine.

Hallam Stevens (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

 

12:00-1:30: Lunch – U Town Food Court

 

1:30-3:00: Session 1

A.      Usage and Representation – Seminar Room 2, Education Resource Centre

Chair & Commentator: Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA) – 20 min. per speaker

• Art, Maths, Electronics and Micros: Convergence and divergence in the work of Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski. Presenter: Melanie Swalwell (Flinders University, Australia) Co-author: Maria Garda (University of Lódz, Poland)
• Feeling Machines & Model Humans: The Genesis of Emotional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), 1975-1985. Presenter: Luke Stark (New York University, USA)
• When Physicists Meet Microprocessors: Professional Scientific Hackers at the Dawn of the Micro Era in France. Presenter: Loïc Petitgirard (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, France)

B.       Data and Policy – Seminar Room 3, Education Resource Centre

Chair & Commentator: Ksenia Tatarchenko (University of Geneva, Switzerland) – 15 min. per speaker

• Local Data, Local Users: A Case Study in Data Visualization for Computer History with Softalk Magazine. Presenters: Laine Nooney (Georgia Tech, USA) and Kevin Driscoll (Microsoft Research, USA)
• From Computing Clerks to Androids – A Tentative Archaeology of ‘Data’ in India. Presenter: Sandeep Mertia (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, India)
• Opening the CryptoDB Vault to Map Convergence and Divergence in Cryptologic Research. Presenter: Niranjan Sivakumar (Sciences Po Medialab, France)
• Social capital and ICT: an historical analysis of regional policy initiatives in Australia and New Zealand. Presenter: Janet Toland (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand). Co-author: William Tibben (University of Wollongong, Australia).

 

3:00-3:30: Break

 

3:30-5:00: Session 2

A.      Cybersecurity: Genealogies and Practices – Seminar Room 2, Education Resource Centre

Chair & Commentator: Quinn DuPont (University of Toronto, Canada) – 20 min. per speaker

• Measuring Computer Security. Presenter: Rebecca Slayton (Cornell University, USA)
• Historical Consciousness of Cybersecurity in India. Presenter: Ramesh Subramanian (Quinnipiac University & Yale University, USA)
• Political and Sociocultural Formation of Cybersecurity Policy in the US, EU, and China. Presenter: Morten Bay (UCLA, USA)

B.       Works in Progress – Seminar Room 3, Education Resource Centre

Chair & Commentator: Melanie Swalwell (Flinders University, Australia) – 20 min. per speaker

• Assembling peripherics. Networks of exchange and Colombian technoculture in the 1980s. Presenter: Fabian Prieto-Nanez (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
• A Body in Motion: A History of Human Modeling for Computer Graphics and Animation, 1960s-1980s. Presenter: Alana Staiti (Cornell University, USA)
• Colossus and the Origins of Programmability. Presenter: Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA), Co-author: Mark Priestley (Freelance Researcher)

 

6:00: Meet for Dinner

Winner: David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerard Alberts, “When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Compter Programming, 1950-1960,” Technology and Culture 55 (January 2014): 40-75.

Prize Citation: This paper presents a history of the emergence of high-level computer languages, documenting co-evolving relationships between computer technology and communities of practice. In tracing the genealogy of a phenomenon that seems to us today second nature — the “computer language” — their work is a particularly worthy inaugural winner of a prize honoring Mike Mahoney, who did so much to conceptualize the history of that most evanescent technology, computer software.

Winner: Rebecca Slayton, Arguments That Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (MIT, 2013).

Prize Citation: Rebecca Slayton’s Arguments That Count advances the history of computing in several significant ways. Through careful, original research and clear writing, Slayton grants a wide audience access to the complex and highly controversial story of the role of computing in missile defense. Slayton’s book deftly unpacks the institutional and rhetorical aspects of arguments set forth by physicists and computer scientists as they wrangled over the feasibility of developing systems capable of stopping ICBMs. By demonstrating how scientists and computing experts crafted and sold their arguments justifying the development of risky, expensive technological solutions to geopolitical problems, this study yields insights that are relevant to the many other areas in which heavy investment in technological systems is championed as a solution to existential problem.