[SIGCIS-Members] Mass-market historic computers, display and interaction

[Henry Lowood]

Melanie's note reminds me that perhaps my keynote for her Born Digital 
Heritage conference last year is relevant: It was in large part to say 
that there is no single use case for repositories of computing 
collections. I focused on historians, re-enactors (given a computing 
context) and media archaeologists, but there will be more.  It is 
important, with limited resources, that different institutions consider 
which use cases they wish to serve and allocate resources accordingly.  
I hope that means that in the aggregate we see many different kinds of 
projects - some restoration, some documentation, etc., some focused on 
Big Iron, others on consumer-grade computing, etc.
Henry


On 1/19/2015 10:54 PM, Melanie Swalwell wrote:
> Dear James,
>
> There was a conference in 2013 at the London Science Museum devoted to the question of "Making the history of computing relevant".  A colleague, Helen Stuckey, gave a paper on behalf of some of the Play It Again team which I lead.  This project is focused on the history and preservation needs of 1980s microcomputer games from Australia and New Zealand, so pretty much the mass market machines you are talking about.  In considering the question of how to present the history of 80s micro games we have emphasised the role of popular memory, and -- through a web interface that we call the Popular Memory Archive -- asked the public to share their memories of particular games and computing generally.  User reflections (and uploads) on what these computers mean and meant to them are often very animated and frequently much more entertaining than, say, museum didactics.  We have a nice emerging collection of photos of computers in domestic interiors, also, dotted throughout the various
>    parts of the site, with several at http://playitagainproject.org/contribute We see the fact that these machines weren't unique but mass produced and familiar to many as a plus, rather than a negative -- it means that many people remember them and can share their memories.
>
> The papers from the London conference were published by Springer/IFIP so I can't just put it online (another version is published in the ACM Digital Library at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2513570 which may be more accessible to those with library access).  I'm also happy to make a copy of our paper available to anyone who's interested individually -- just email me off list.
>
> Regards,
>
> Melanie
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members

-- 
Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
   Film & Media Collections
HSSG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood