[SIGCIS-Members] FW: Atsushi Akera wins 2010 Computer History Museum Prize

Thomas Haigh thaigh at computer.org
Thu Oct 14 13:59:20 PDT 2010


Here’s an announcement covering one highlight of our recent annual meeting.
More updates soon. Thanks to the prize committee and all who submitted their
work. Tom

Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and
Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research (MIT Press, 2007)

SHOT SIGCIS this year awards its Computer History Museum Prize for an
outstanding book on the history of computing to Atsushi Akera's Calculating
a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of
U.S. Cold War Research (MIT Press 2007). This ambitious and
theoretically-sophisticated study is both a history of mid-century computing
and a history of an emerging infrastructure for Cold War research in the
U.S. From wartime work on ENIAC, to the development of time-sharing at MIT
and Michigan, to IBM's entry into technical computing, the impressively
researched case studies in each chapter revisit well-known episodes in
computing history as part of a much larger story. Akera's interest in the
productive tensions that animated the work of the
military-industrial-academic complex -- extending existing scholarship in
this area -- undergirds a grounded theory of innovation that will shape
future work in our field. We believe the book's treatment of core episodes
in computing history as well as its "ecology of knowledge" perspective will
find a wide audience.

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 $1000 is awarded by SIGCIS, the Special
Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society. It is established
through the generosity of an anonymous donor who wishes to honor the
Computer History Museum. SIGCIS is part of the Society for the History of
Technology.

2010 Prize Committee Members

Jennifer S. Light (Chair)
Northwestern University

Thomas J. Misa
Charles Babbage Institute

Pierre Mounier-Kuhn
CNRS & Université Paris-Sorbonne




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