[SIGCIS-Members] Documenting Swedish IT-history

Wed Mar 10 06:57:33 PST 2010

The English final report is excellent for those of us who do not read
Swedish because, in addition to describing the project Per mentions, it
describes publications and themes in IT Swedish history, and the
bibliography is quite complete.  I am in the process of trying to acquire
the books cited in the bibliography but I have to say it is proving to be a
challenge.  If Per can suggest how we can get our hands on some of these
publications, I would love to get a bunch of them into CBI, even if we have
problems reading them, so that they are accessible to future scholars.  I
plan to be in Sweden in the Fall and one of the things I intend to do is to
try and acquire as many of these as I can for CBI.  I will also advocate
that more Swedish scholarship be published in other languages that are more
accessible to historians outside of Sweden.

I have gone to the website with the oral histories and he is correct in
saying that there are thousands of pages.  What is important to note is
that the people interviewed are from many different professions within the
IT community.  The English summaries were more an introduction to who was
interviewed than a summary of their key messages so we are going to have to
find someday a piece of software that can do a good job in translating
these thousands of pages.  The Swedes have done more to document their
recent history than most other European countries so far.  The key point of
emphasis of these interviews is that they focus on uses of IT and on
users--the demand side of the story--rather than just on the role of the IT
industry--the supply side--and so is of potentially great value to
historians of European IT.

By the way, Per is an outstanding collaborator and supporter of anyone
doing research on IT.  He gives generously of his time and of his
considerable insights and knowledge.

Cheers,

Dr. Jim (James) W. Cortada
IBM Institute for Business Value
2917 Irvington Way
Madison, WI 53713 USA
jwcorta at us.ibm.com
608-270-4462

  From:       "Per Lundin" <plundin at kth.se>                                                                                         

  To:         <members at sigcis.org>                                                                                                  

  Date::      03/10/10 08:03 AM                                                                                                     

  Subject:    [SIGCIS-Members] Documenting Swedish IT-history                                                                       

  Sent by:    members-bounces at sigcis.org                                                                                            

You might be interested in the results of a rather large project on
documenting Swedish IT-history from a user-centered perspective, which was
finished last year. The project, called From Computing Machines to IT, was
a
collaboration between the Div. of History of Science and Technology at KTH,
The Swedish Computer Society and the Swedish National Museum of Science and
Technology. It aimed to create, collect, preserve and disseminate sources
on
how computing shaped and transformed Swedish society between 1950 and 1980.

In the project, more than 160 oral history interviews were conducted,
almost
50 so-called witness seminars were arranged, and about 230 written
recollections were acquired with the help of traditional questionnaires as
well as Internetbased collection of memories. The created sources consist
of
more than 8,000 pages of text.

The material is, unfortunately, at least for non-Scandinavians, in Swedish,
but we have provided the oral history interviews and the witness seminars
with abstracts in English. The material is accessible on the Internet as
fully searchable pdf-files. The project and the created and collected
sources are furthermore contextualized, described and evaluated in a final
report available in English at: http://en.scientificcommons.org/54397748 or
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-11945. The final report
provides links to the material. Swedish speaking users might also benefit
from the website: www.ithistoria.se.

Best regards,
Per

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
Per Lundin
Div. of History of Science and Technology
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
SE-100 44 Stockholm
Sweden

Phone: +46 8 790 87 41
Fax: +46 8 24 62 63
http://www.teknikhistoria.se
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤

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