[SIGCIS-Members] Summer reading for historians of computing -- your suggestions

[Thomas Haigh]

Hello SIGCIS members,

Please consider helping the community sharpen its engagement with new ideas.
Back in graduate school I read feverishly in labor history, business
history, history of technology social history, organizational sociology, etc
in preparation for my oral examinations. My classes covered still more
eclectic topics, ranging from a "greatest hits" of literary theory to
nonparametric methods. Over the ten years since I physically left Penn I've
been focused on an ever more specialized set of literatures, primarily the
burgeoning history of computing field, which I know in ever more depth. In
general I've also been doing more writing and less reading. This is probably
pretty typical of the intellectual career of a tenured academic, expressed
in the cliché that we come to know "more and more about less and less,"
though as I don't have an opportunity to teach any courses related to my
interests it may be a little more extreme.

Last summer I finally read Latour's _Science in Action_ properly for the
first time (lying outside a dacha on the outskirts of Kiev) and enjoyed it
rather more than I'd expected. That hardly puts me on the cutting edge of
intellectual fashion, but it did remind me of the pleasure of reading a
really nicely constructed and provocative book of general interest.

So, putting these two thoughts together I wondered what new work of equally
broad interest might have appeared over the past ten years. I'm thinking of
books of implicit rather than explicit relevance to the history of
computing, either offering new intellectual perspectives or just serving as
models of craft. Scholarly books that could be read for pleasure rather than
duty. I'm sure suggestions would be of general interest to the SIGCIS
community, as it heads to the beaches, lakes, mountains and dachas of the
world.

Suggestions should include the book and a short description of why it
deserve to be read widely by historians of computing.

I'd like to accumulate suggestions on our website, as comments to a blog
post: http://www.sigcis.org/node/271. We just upgraded our site, so it's
easy to post comments using our new WYSIWIG editor. You do need to login
first, but accounts are free and you have probably already registered (if
you forgot your password it can be reset online). While you are there,
please also explore our latest posts from bloggers including Chris McDonald,
Marie Hicks and Dave Walden. http://www.sigcis.org/blog

However you could also just email a reply to the list if you have trouble
logging in.

Tom

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