<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Hi
everyone,<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">I would
like to offer two things. First is a note on three points that can help us
to engage productively with work that draws on gender and sexuality studies even if we have never encountered those perspectives.
Second is a respond to Jeff Tyzzer’s awesome questions on what kinds of
feedback professional historians value.<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="gmail-MsoListParagraph" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in;line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">I.<span style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:7pt;line-height:normal;font-family:"Times New Roman"">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">We
value work on gender and sexuality<span></span></span></b></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Here at
SIGCIS, we value and welcome the work of scholars who draw from the
perspectives of gender and sexuality studies. If you have never engaged with
this rich and fascinating collection of methods, I encourage you to consider
these three departure points that helped me get started back when I began my graduate work:<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif"><b>1)</b>
Analyses of the gender politics in the history of technology may not (and
probably will not) align with what participants in these histories remember,
and that’s a good thing. We know well from gender and sexuality studies that we
all face gender politics often without realizing it, and it would be unwise for us not to analyze something just because no one remembers it. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif"><b>2) </b>We
should be careful whenever we encounter calls to preserve narrative integrity,
impose methodological consistency, or adhere to arbitrary scholarly standards.
These efforts can (even accidentally) perpetuate patterns of male privilege. At
the very least, in practice they can end up favoring men’s analyses and actions
over all others. This is antithetical to our values. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif"><b>3) </b>Privileged
access to historical actors is not the only means (let alone the most reliable
one) through which scholars can analyze the gender politics of a historical process. In fact one of
the key first lessons from introductory oral history courses is how to deal
with the fact that different participants will often have completely different
perspectives on the same thing. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="gmail-MsoListParagraph" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in;line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">II.<span style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:7pt;line-height:normal;font-family:"Times New Roman"">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Healthy
and professional academic criticism is open and generous, not hostile<span></span></span></b></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Thank
you, Jeff Tyzzard, for posing your questions. I can only speak for myself, but I hope that the Q&A below will address what you asked. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><b><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">How
much evidence do historians include in a talk? <span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Conference
talks and published works play very different roles in our research. For
instance, it would be impossible for me to offer all the evidence I have
available for an argument in a 20 minute talk. If I were to write the talk
down, I would probably need between 40 and 60 citations, with many of them
pointing to several sources. That's far more than what I could include in a few
powerpoint slides or mention in a short talk without sounding like I'm reciting
a laundry list. Critiquing a talk because it fails to showcase every bit of
evidence available is unproductive; that's simply not what talks are meant to
do. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><b><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">What
kinds of feedback are helpful?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">I have
found that the most helpful feedback is the one intended to help me reflect on
my methods, my argument, or how I position my work in relationship with the
rest of our field. Some of my most valued questions fall along these lines:
What else could I do to enrich the argument? How could I articulate with
greater clarity my argument's place in our collective body of work? What
alternative published arguments or interpretations should I engage with? Where
else could I look for sources? Did I overlook any important sources or
methods? <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><b><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Why don’t
professional historians write full reviews of each others’ talks?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">One of the many reasons why we don't write public extensive
critiques of each others' talks is simply that this arrangement for feedback
places the speaker at an unfair disadvantage. For instance, the person writing
the critique can incorporate footnotes, hyperlinks, and all sorts of other
evidentiary support; the speaker can't do that. For this reason, it is proper
to reserve our sharpest critiques for each others' written work; this helps us
even the playing field between the critique and the work being criticized. And
even then, our critiques are directed at the work, not the person who wrote it.
Certainly, we identify and highlight where authors fell short, misconstrued
material, or produced a subpar analysis, but we only do so after reading the
fully polished published work--the best and most thoroughly documented argument
that the author can make. Anything less than this amount of professional
courtesy is downright unprofessional and unacceptable. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><b><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">And why
take all these things into consideration in the first place?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">This
respect for healthy academic criticism is essential to ensure that our field
remains vibrant and open--connected not just to our roots as historians of
computing, but also to the larger interdisciplinary community of scholars
interested in the technologies we study. One of the many things that can make
professional historical work innovative is its ability to challenge our
established narratives and the methods we use. This is difficult and time consuming, and talks are essential to help propel the scholars forward. <span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">I'll be
happy to write more about this. But for now, I would just like to echo Marie's
note on how important it is to be collegial and supportive. This is most
important when we disagree with one another. SIGCIS is a wonderful collaborative
space, and our embrace of healthy and professional modes of academic criticism
is essential to keep it that way. <span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif"><br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Best,</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Georgia,serif">Con Diaz</span></p></div><div class="gmail_extra"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:12.8px"><i style="font-size:12.8px"><font size="2" face="georgia, serif">Gerardo Con Diaz</font></i><br></div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="georgia, serif" size="2">Assistant Professor</font></div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="georgia, serif" size="2">Science and Technology Studies<br></font></div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="georgia, serif" size="2">University of California, Davis</font></div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><a href="http://www.condiaz.com/" style="font-size:12.8px" target="_blank"><font face="georgia, serif">www.condiaz.com</font></a></div></div></div>
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