[SIGCIS-Members] What can SIGCIS learn methodologically from the history of science, environmental history, etc?

[Ksenia Tatarchenko]

Hi,I would like to add a pragmatic comment along the same line as James. Working on Soviet history I am particularly vulnerable to problems of communicating my research results effectively and would be interested in learning from the successful models in our field. How about organizing a round-table around the texts artfully combining such methodologies: following the thread I am thinking about the winners such as Arguments that Count and "When technology became language: the origins of the linguistic conception of computer programming, 1950-1960."Ksenia






      De : James Cortada <jcortada at umn.edu>
 À : "thaigh at computer.org" <thaigh at computer.org> 
Cc : sigcis <members at sigcis.org> 
 Envoyé le : Jeudi 15 octobre 2015 4h51
 Objet : Re: [SIGCIS-Members] What can SIGCIS learn methodologically from the history of science, environmental history, etc?
   
I agree that it was a solid session.  Nathan delivered one of the finest and most important lectures on computing that I have heard in a long iime.  I agree that scholars of computing need to expand their contextual comments, especially since an increasing number of historians in many fields are recognizing the importance of IT in their domains.
I have a suggestion for the young scholars: make sure your commentators receive your papers or slides long in advance of a session, not one, two or three days before you present so that they can aply their thinking thoughtfylly to your work.  What I am suggesting is how highly experienced scholars operate routinely.  
Bottom line: Good session, loved the growing number of participants.  A great shout out to th organizers.
On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 5:32 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org> wrote:



Dear SIGCIS, We just had a wonderful meeting, which I could enjoy all the more as it was the first of the seven SIGCIS workshops where I had no operational responsibilities. Nathan really did a great job with the keynote, and it was splendid to see so many people making the transition from list membership to physical participation at SHOT and SIGCIS for the first time. Better still were the people who had been “first timers” in 2013 or 2014 coming back for a second meeting, as this proves they found the experience useful. I think we accounted for a very significant fraction of the overall graduate student attendance at SHOT. My impression was that the research and delivery of the SIGCIS papers held up pretty well against the quality of material in most parts of the main SHOT program. However I also heard a suggestion from one person that many of the papers in both venues tended to be very narrowly framed, telling a particular story without really engaging with a broader literature or being explicit about what general lessons or methodological implications the work holds. To the extent that this is true, one could see an aversion to explicit historiography and to the drawing of broad conclusions as a kind of aesthetic preference rather than a failing of craft or scholarship. Still, I was wondering if list members might be able to suggest recent (say post-2010) papers from other traditions that are effective in using a focused historical study to make a compelling case that we should think differently about a topic of broad interest to the field in question. I’m not thinking necessarily about work related to IT, since the literature in many areas of history of science, environmental history, history of medicine, and other fields is more mature and appears to have developed a clearer sense of what the “big questions” are. However I have had few opportunities since grad school to read systematically in other literatures. So list members, please post away with your nominations of recent articles from other fields with an explanation of what cool thing you think the article is doing methodologically that those of us writing on the history of computing could learn from. Best wishes, Tom    
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-- 
James W. CortadaSenior Research FellowCharles Babbage InstituteUniversity of Minnesotajcortada at umn.edu608-274-6382
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