[SIGCIS-Members] SIGCIS at the Manchester Congress

[Thomas Haigh]

Hello everyone,

Like many of you I will soon be on my way to Manchester to take part in the gigantic iCHSTM congress (which includes ICOTECH, the international history of technology meeting, and an array of other events. Below are parts of a reposted message sent to the list a few months ago by our own James Sumner, who seems to be shouldering a very large part of the organizational burden for the meeting. I've reshuffled the events into order, and removed one that has been cancelled but there are probably various changes since then so my advice is to check details here against the main program, http://www.ichstm2013.com/programme/, for anything you particularly care about. Look particularly at the line "Computing, information, comms" on the chart here: http://www.ichstm2013.com/programme/timetable.html. 

>From the list below we should have probably the biggest concentration of SIGCIS members ever gathered outside our own events at SHOT. I'm going to be there for the whole week, and expect that this will give a chance to spend happy times with many of you inside and outside the official events.  It also happens that July 24 is my birthday. Given this, and the fact that I lived in Manchester for four years as a student and retain a great fondness for the place, I'm thinking that the evening of July 24 would be a particularly appropriate date on which to assemble anyone who is interested for an informal tour of historic pubs and elegant bars around the city center. Reply to this message if you are interested and I'll create a small email group to plan the specifics. (July 24 seems to be between the main SIGCIS related events so if you are interested but won't be that day reply anyway and perhaps we will move it).

Extracts from James' message:

		SIGCIS has a symposium (group of themed sessions) at the Congress, organised by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, Miguel Garcia-Sancho and myself, and a lot of familiar SIGCIS faces will be presenting both within this symposium and elsewhere…. The theme of the SIGCIS symposium is "Data at work".... By my reckoning, there are at least 40 obviously SIGCIS-relevant papers on the programme, most of which appear on a dedicated "Computing, information, comms" track to avoid clashes: see the timetable at <http://www.ichstm2013.com/programme/timetable.html>. Some wider connections to themes relevant to some researchers on this list are covered in the "Systems, data, automation, computation" section at <http://www.ichstm2013.com/programme/guide/m/discipline.html#a3>.

		Below (with apologies for likelihood of mangled text on some systems) I have cut and pasted listings of several core relevant symposia. I would emphasise, however, that there is a *lot* of interesting material on the wider programme, in fields ranging from military communications to systems biology to the use of digital techniques in teaching history. And there are highly relevant papers in broader sessions about other themes. Two that leapt out at me are Per Lundin in S078 on oral history, and Dick van Lente in T193 on STM in the public sphere. There are almost certainly others: let me know what I've missed!

My reformatting and arrangement in chronological order of the relevant session information (which, to repeat the disclaimed, may now be out of date):

S086-B. Biology, agriculture and medicine Mon 22 July, early afternoon
Chair: to be announced

Miguel GARCIA-SANCHO | University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Writing the history of ‘computers’ and ‘data’ through their interactions with biomedical research: from the genetic code to DNA sequencing
(1950s-1980s)

Joseph NOVEMBER | University of South Carolina, United States The Cochrane Collaboration, beyond Cochrane

Hallam STEVENS | Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Generating value: the Ensembl database and the dynamics of data

Sabina LEONELLI | University of Exeter, United Kingdom Putting data to work in plant science, 1990-2012

S086-C. Making coding cultures
Mon 22 July, late afternoon
Chair: James SUMNER | University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Liesbeth DE MOL | Ghent University, Belgium  From the machine’s eye? ENIAC and its different users

Thomas HAIGH | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States Rethinking the stored-program concept

David NOFRE | Independent scholar, Netherlands The promises and problems of a universal programming language:
reconciling scientific inquiry and technological stability in the ALGOL project, 1960-1965

Tilly BLYTH | Science Museum, London, United Kingdom De-coding public service: the production and consumption of cultural values in the BBC microcomputer


P125. Enforced specialization in computing technology: debugging the history of cooperation and competition in COMECON countries
Tue 23 July, early morning until early morning

Chair: Thomas HAIGH | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States

Pierre BOUILLON | École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, France A paradoxical Franco-Romanian cooperation in computers, both supported and circumscribed by the Cold War

Slawomir LOTYSZ | University of Zielona Gora, Poland Plaiting a whip of sand: ups and downs of optical fiber technology in
pre-1989 Poland

Petri PAJU | University of Turku, Finland Finlandized computing or business as usual? Computer trade between Finland and the Soviet bloc in the 1970s

Frank DITTMANN | Deutsches Museum, Germany The development of network technology in COMECON countries


S005-A. Approaching machines and mathematics Fri 26 July, early morning
Chair: Maarten BULLYNCK | Université Paris 8, France

Anthony MOORE | Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, France Music machines and aural arithmetic

Peggy Aldrich KIDWELL | Smithsonian Institution, United States Mathematical recreations and machines

Doron SWADE | Independent scholar, United Kingdom Mathematics and machines: from calculation to computing

Gerard ALBERTS | University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Mathematics as a machine

S005-B. Numerical mathematics and analog computing Fri 26 July, late morning

Chair: Marie-José DURAND-RICHARD | Laboratoire SPHERE-UMR 7219, France

Johannes LENHARD | University of Bielefeld, Germany Mathematics, machines, design: Carl Runge and the contested status of numerical mathematics

Helena DURNOVA | Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Václav Láska (1862-1943) and Václav Hruška (1888-1954): machines and practices in calculation in interwar Czechoslovakia

Ulf HASHAGEN | Deutsches Museum, Germany Analog computing as a failed modernization program in the military-industrial-academic complex of the Third Reich

Loïc PETITGIRARD | Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, France Analog computing and the mathematics of dynamical systems: ‘theoretical dynamics’ at the Centre de Recherche en Physique, Marseille, France,
1948-1964

S005-C. Mathematics through the machine's eye: the advent of digital computing Fri 26 July, early afternoon
Chair: Liesbeth DE MOL | Ghent University, Belgium

Marie-José DURAND-RICHARD | Laboratoire SPHERE-UMR 7219, France Douglas R Hartree (1897-1958): from the differential analyzer to digital computers

Allan OLLEY | Independent scholar, Canada A task that exceeded the technology: early applications of the computer to the lunar three-body problem

Maarten BULLYNCK | Université Paris 8, France Computing primes with the help of machinery (1929-1949)

Mark PRIESTLEY | University College London, United Kingdom  From computing plan to computer program: Monte Carlo and the ‘miracle of the ENIAC’

S005-D. Programming mathematics on digital computers Fri 26 July, late afternoon
Chair: Liesbeth DE MOL | Ghent University, Belgium

Claude LOBRY | INRIA-MODEMIC, France
De la «mise en equation» à la «mise en programme»

Wolfgang BRAND | University of Stuttgart, Germany Getting in shape, form-finding in architecture: the force-density method as a bridge between mathematics and machine

Edgar DAYLIGHT | Independent Scholar, Belgium Edsger W. Dijkstra in the 1980s: proving theorems by programming an ideal, non-existing, machine

Commentary: Renate TOBIES | Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany

T202-A. Information technology Sat 27 July, early morning

Chair: to be announced

Marcelo VIANNA | Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul - PUCRS, Brazil Para além dos clones – a formação do campo da Informática no Brasil nos anos 1980 através de três casos de fabricantes de microcomputadores (1980-1988).
Beyond clones: the building up of the Brazilian information technology field in the 1980s through three cases of personal computer manufacturers, 1980-1988

Aracele TORRES | University of São Paulo, Brazil Os estudos do software e a compreensão da sociedade contemporânea: o caso do movimento software livre Software studies and the understanding of contemporary society: the free software movement case

BAO Ou | Institution of Science Technology & Society, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, China
翻译工作在中国计算机起步中的作用（1953-1967）
The role of translation in China’s starting development of the computer,
1953-1967

Scott CAMPBELL | University of Waterloo, Canada Computation centres, configured users and early computer technology in Canada

Best wishes,

Tom
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