[SIGCIS-Members] SIGCIS: gender, race, working class history, imperialism....

[geoghegb at cms.hu-berlin.de]

Hi SIGCIS,

One of the surprising accusations surrounding this email nonsense was that
SIGCIS promoted racism, gender bias, and industrial domination. I was
curious enough to visit our website and see where we address these topics
in the history of informatics. It seems that on
http://www.sigcis.org/resources we have not addressed  issues like race,
gender, sexuality, and working class history in informatics. Given the
rich range of other resources we offer along these lines, I think a few
subsections in these areas would be worthwhile. If the group approves of
adding these resources, topics and authors that may be germane include

1) Gender and Computing (Hayles on the Turing Test in POSTHUMAN, Haraway
misc., Stone on Lovelace, Light on "When Computers were Women")
2) A People's History of Computing (Robins & Webster on "Long History of
the Information Revolution", Schaffer on "Babbage's Intelligence"?)

If there is interest in putting something like this together and putting
it up as resources, maybe we can bounce the email back and forth, quoting
and amending the brief list above to quickly generate something better.

Best,
Bernard