October 2014 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

job opening at NSF
by Ceruzzi, Paul 25 Oct '14

25 Oct '14

In case you haven't seen this, there is a job opening for a historian at the NSF. https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/384375000 Paul Ceruzzi

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Woman in computing - NPR interviews
by Allan Olley 25 Oct '14

25 Oct '14

Hello, Just following up on the e-mail Janet Abbate sent, I think the podcast she menitoned is up. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-… An interesting piece (about 17 minutes) on the trend away from women majoring in Comp Sci that started in 1984. Some reference to the prominence of women in the early computer industry and then looking at the personal computer culture of the period. Also, references to later attempts to increase participation rates among women in computer science (specifically the project in the mid 90s by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher at Carnagie Mellon). It ends by acknowledging many people and sources including various pioneers, the organizers of the Grace Hopper conference, the book Gender Codes and its editor Tom Misa and authors including Janet Abbate and Carolyn Clark Hayes (sorry I don't have the energy to transcribe the list). -- Yours Truly, Allan Olley, PhD http://individual.utoronto.ca/fofound/

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Fwd: CFP: Special Issue of Personal & Ubiquitous Computing on Histories of Ubicomp
by Fred Turner 23 Oct '14

23 Oct '14

> CFP: Special Issue of Personal & Ubiquitous Computing on Histories of Ubicomp > Editors: Jofish Kaye, Yahoo Labs, and Molly Wright Steenson, University of Wisconsin-Madison > > As ubiquitous computing has grown as a field, so too have the narratives around both ubicomp’s origins and how those origins impact its futures. In this special issue of Personal & Ubiquitous Computing, we seek to articulate those multiple voices and histories reflecting these multiple origins, each of which has a story to tell about the history of ubiquitous computing. These histories reside in multiple fields, from computer science and informatics, to history of science and STS, to design and urban planning—to name a few—as well as ubicomp’s new instantiations, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, the architecture of the cloud, and mobile computing. > > For this special issue, topics include but are not limited to: > Histories of ubiquitous computing technologies > Studies and histories of corporations, individuals and organizations influential in the growth of ubiquitous computing > The influence of ubiquitous computing technologies > Studies of networks of ubicomp researchers > Comparative, historical studies of ubicomp applications & environments > Lesser known players in the field of ubicomp > Histories of information environments > Ubicomp in architecture and urbanism > Ubicomp and user experience > Ubicomp and art > Ubicomp and critical design > Ubicomp and cybernetics > Ubicomp, gender and diversity > > Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submissions should be prepared according to the author instructions available at http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/journal/779 . Abstracts of no longer than 250 words must be submitted in the form of PDF files to the editors at ubihistory(a)yahoo.com by 1 December 2014. Information about the manuscript (title, full list of authors, corresponding author contact, abstract, and keywords) must be included in the submission email. Questions about appropriateness of topics may be directed to the editors at ubihistory(a)yahoo.com . > > Important dates: > Deadline for Abstract: 1 December 2014 > Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 22 December 2015 > Deadline for Submission: 1 Februrary 2015 > Final Manuscript Due: 1 May 2015 > Publication Date: To Be Announced

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Xerox Alto source code release at CHM
by Paul McJones 22 Oct '14

22 Oct '14

For those interested in studying primary materials (source code, documentation, etc.) from the Alto system built at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, the Computer History Museum has released an archive with snapshots of the Alto file servers at PARC taken at various times from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s. This @CHM blog post introduces the archive: Xerox Alto Source Code: The roots of the modern personal computer Paul McJones October 21, 2014 http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/ <http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/xerox-alto-source-code/> A “walk-through” of the archive is here: http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html <http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html> The archive is here: http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/ <http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/> More detail about the archive (provenance, naming conventions, file types, etc.) is available here: http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html/#A… <http://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/xerox_alto_file_system_archive.html/#A…> . Paul McJones

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computing and historiography
by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan 20 Oct '14

20 Oct '14

Hi SIGCISers, I'm continuing to mull over the citation & journalism controversies of recent weeks (actually it's years I realize, now that I went back to take a second look at Nathan's WaPo incident). Some of my reflections are up on my blog. I will make some more substantial followup posts in the coming week or two. Link here, for anyone interested: http://bit.ly/10d4YOD Feedback welcome. And on the idea of relaying links etc via the SIGCIS page: I would welcome having my comments or links reproduced on our webpage (though I may need to make some minor revisions before the whole text was reproduced--I'm still thinking-in-draft format). Best, Bernard -- Dr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Institut für Kulturwissenschaft Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin www.bernardg.com

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Should we aspire to be featured in or write for the New Yorker?
by Thomas Haigh 15 Oct '14

15 Oct '14

Hello everyone, I'd like to thank Ian and Bernard for their thoughtful contributions. Here's a bigger question that comes to mind as I ponder all the issues raised over the last few days in this stimulating conversation. Just for the moment, let's assume that whatever outrage anyone might be feeling is just a product of submersion in an unworldly academic culture. Let's assume that Evgeny Morozov and Janet Browne are entirely correct. That this is just how highbrow journalism works. The New Yorker does things in a particular way. Call it editorial determinism. There could only be one mention of Eden Medina, "entertaining" was just the right word, and it had to come in the tenth paragraph. The New Yorker prose aesthetic provided no alternatives. The Tumblr and twitter responses from Morozov resolved the matter. There will be no apology. There should be no apology. Let's assume that these are indeed the only terms on which the work of an award winning scholar can be popularized in the New Yorker. That these are the only terms on which a pugilistic public intellectual who is also a Harvard graduate student can or should engage with the work of an award winning scholar on the pages of the New Yorker. Take it or leave it. I'd bet that many historians dream of one day having their work profiled at length in the New Yorker, or, even less plausibly, of themselves being invited to contribute to its hallowed pages. Having that happen might seem like winning the lottery. But if nothing at all went wrong here, perhaps it shouldn't. Maybe the dream is more of a nightmare. Perhaps the New Yorker and scholarship are best kept apart. Best wishes, Tom

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Call for papers 'Software as Scholarship', Bern, 29-30 January 2015 - extended deadline
by tara.andrews＠kps.unibe.ch 15 Oct '14

15 Oct '14

Dear SIGCIS members, I forward the following call for papers: although the original deadline has passed, I have only recently been made aware of the existence of the group and would be delighted to have an abstract from anyone here who feels moved to provide one! The extended deadline will be 26 October 2014. With best wishes, Tara Andrews -- Prof. Dr. Tara L Andrews Digital Humanities, Universität Bern http://www.dh.unibe.ch/ Scholarship in Software, Software as Scholarship: From Genesis to Peer Review ‘Expressions’, 29 January 2015: Workshop on Software-based Scholarship Organizer: Digital Humanities, Universität Bern Computation and software analysis have entered nearly every imaginable field of scholarship in the last decades, in a variety of forms from digital publication of results to computational modelling embedded in experimental work. In each of these digital outputs – be it an interactive publication with mapping of relevant geo-referenced data, or perhaps a statistical program for the categorization of millions of books according to their literary genre – there is some manifestation directly in the computer code of the scholarly thought that underlies the project, of the intellectual argument around which the outcome is based. The fact that scholarly software includes scholarly content is reasonably well-accepted. What remains controversial is the attempt at identification, in any particular instance, of what scholarly contribution has been made by a piece of software. Its makers tend to express the scholarship in writing separate from the software itself, if they even make explicit at all the scholarly reasoning that went into the code; its reviewers and users tend either to treat the software as a ‘black box’, opaque to informed scrutiny and therefore to be looked on with grave suspicion, or to deny that this particular software has any scholarship inherent to the source code. Given that our mechanisms for identifying and evaluating the scholarship within computer code are nearly nonexistent, we must ask: how do intellectual arguments — how does scholarship — come to be expressed in the software of digital humanities? How does this scholarship, so evident in theory but so elusive in practice, fit into the scientific process of advancement of knowledge? ‘Evaluation’, 30 January 2015: Round table on Peer Review for Digital Scholarly Work Organizer: Infoclio.ch<http://Infoclio.ch> Related to the question of the expression of scholarship in software, and in other forms of digital publication as well, is the question of how to evaluate it. This topic will be the focus of a half-day roundtable, Peer Review for Digital Scholarly Work, to be held on 30 January 2015. Digital scholarly works such as Digital Editions, Digital Libraries, Digital Exhibitions, Data Visualization, Geographical Information Systems and the like are increasingly frequent in the Humanities, as main or secondary output of research projects; the question of how best to evaluate them takes on ever greater importance. At the moment, researchers doing digital scholarly work are usually unable to obtain academic credit for their work—in order to obtain scholarly recognition, they must additionally publish a “normal” article in a print-based journal about their digital work. As universities and national research funding agencies across the world move toward encouraging more digital scholarship in the humanities, there is an urgent need to discuss the criteria and benchmarks that should be in place for evaluating digital scholarly work. We welcome contributions about existing initiatives in this domain as well as more theoretical contributions that treat the topic of peer review of digital scholarly work. Practical information We now invite participants for each of the workshop and the round table. • For the WORKSHOP, please submit a 500-word abstract of the work you will present. • For the ROUND TABLE, please submit a 200-word “position paper” indicating your intended contribution to the discussion. Submissions from early-career researchers and “alt-ac” practitioners within the digital humanities are particularly welcome. There are a number of travel bursaries available for speakers; if you would like to be considered for a bursary, please inform us when you submit your abstract. Abstracts should be submitted to thomas.leibundgut at kps.unibe.ch<http://kps.unibe.ch> by 11 October 2014; we will notify contributors of decisions by 23 October. Selected papers arising from the event will appear in an issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, to appear in early 2016.

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Why don't real historians write popular works?
by Dave Walden 15 Oct '14

15 Oct '14

At 07:03 PM 10/12/2014, Jonathan Coopersmith wrote: >There is another reason why historians don't write popular books, a >fear of being labelled a synthesizer by one's >colleagues. Admittedly, that may be partially due to jealousy at >the publicity and income of a best seller, but it is a real issue >especially within the reward structures (such as they exist) of universities. > I wish there was a little more tolerance for different approaches and views. I see many things as real history work: narrow research into primary sources for narrow audiences; synthesis for broad audiences; histories with lots of technology details; personal stories written by participants in the history; writing with lots of context and historiography; writing without context and historiography; etc. I envision all these different types of history writers struggling to make a living or accomplish what they see as a worthy life in the environment in which they chose to work (each with some annoyance at the way their environment operates). I bet very few make "big bucks" from writing computing history. Even a "best seller" in the computing history domain perhaps doesn't make enough money to enable the writer to stop working (although I suspect that a writer with a popular success can make, for a while, some additional money giving paid lectures). I see everyone having their own compulsions for writing (people who don't like to write or don't have a need to write don't write enough to matter): some people write to further their careers; some find a way to make a career of writing; some write for the joy of seeing themselves in print; some write to record what they want the world to know; etc. (Given all the success Isaacson has had outside of writing history, I'd guess he is writing his books for some other primary reason than to live off of the book advance or royalties.) I also suspect that when members of the various tribes get together alone (professionally trained historians or amateur historians or journals historians, etc.), they all have dismissive things to say about the people not in their particular tribe and the way that other tribe writes history and the way their world works.

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Fwd: News - Computer Conservation Society celebrates its silver jubilee
by Brian Randell 15 Oct '14

15 Oct '14

Hi: I thought this would be of interest to SIGCIS members. Cheers Brian Randell News Release Computer Conservation Society celebrates its silver jubilee (photos available on request) 15 October 2014 Hailed as an outstanding success in achieving its ambitious aims, the Computer Conservation Society is 25 years of age and thriving. Millions have seen its working historic computers at close quarters in various museums across the UK and the machines it has reconstructed or restored, like Colossus, the Bombe, and the Manchester Baby and EDSAC, have become world-famous. Established in 1989, the Computer Conservation Society started as a joint venture between BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, the Science Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. In recent years The National Museum of Computing has become a key partner. In those 25 years, the skills and dedication of CCS volunteers have been evident in many bold and ambitious major restoration and reconstruction projects. Their work has established computer conservation standards and models that are now accepted internationally. The first full reconstruction to be completed by the CCS was the Manchester Baby, ready in 1998 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original computer running the first stored program. The fully working Baby still attracts large crowds at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. At Bletchley Park, two landmark CCS reconstructions are the wartime code-breaking Colossus Mark II at the National Museum of Computing at and the Bombe on display at the Bletchley Park Visitor Centre. Restorations of original computers also include the 1950’s Ferranti Pegasus and the 1960’s ICT 1301 (Flossie), best known for its appearance in James Bond films. More recent CCS projects include the restoration of the 1951 Harwell Dekatron (WITCH) computer, now recognised as the world’s oldest original working digital computer, and the ongoing reconstruction of the 1940’s EDSAC computer, the first practical general purpose computer. Sir Neil Cossons, Director of the Science Museum when CCS was founded and now Pro-Provost and Chairman of the Council of the Royal College of Art, said: “The Computer Conservation Society seemed a rather novel concept twenty-five years ago. Today we wouldn’t question the idea, such has been the society’s record of outstanding success and the public's growing appreciation that the computer has a profoundly important history that needs to be captured and reflected back to us through the material evidence.” Doron Swade, who conceived the CCS idea and co-founded the organisation with the late Tony Sale, said: “The combination of computers and conservation is a heady mix as we reflect on the extraordinary achievements of the pioneers of our digital age. At a time when many Museums are increasingly moving to computer screen-based displays rather than artifacts or working objects, the CCS is providing live access to the very machines that have enabled this trend.” Chair of the CCS Rachel Burnett highlighted some of the benefits of CCS activities: “Computer conservation has both social and historical value. The conserved machines offer superb and unique learning opportunities. These working machines offer an unparalleled experience by showing how they actually work and what it was like to operate them. They help bridge generations and give youngsters a perspective of the unparalleled rate of change that continues in the world of computers today. Restoring and reconstructing historic machines draws people into levels of intimate detail with the machine in a way nothing else does. Operating these machines often produces unexpected findings that give greater insights.” Sir Neil Cossons concluded: “Putting working historic machines in front of the public makes a vivid and lasting impact – there is nothing like the real thing. Ensuring that the real thing, expertly restored and reconstructed, can speak to future generations will be the lasting legacy of the CCS.” Membership of the CCS is open to anyone interested in computer conservation and the history of computing. It currently has over 1000 members world-wide. For more information about the CCS, see www.computerconservationsociety.org<http://www.computerconservationsociety.org/> Notes To Editors 1 Ten CCS Projects that have caught the public’s imagination Machine Babbage’s Analytical Engine construction First used c1840 existed only as a design Conservation Ongoing Location to be decided Machine Harwell Differential Analyser reconstruction First used 1930s Conservation Ongoing Location Manchester Museum of Science and Industry and the Science Museum Machine Bombe Reconstruction First used 1940 Conservation 2007 Location Bletchley Park Trust Machine Colossus Rebuild First used 1944 Conservation 2007 Location The National Museum of Computing Machine Manchester Baby reconstruction First used 1948 Conservation 1998 Location Manchester Museum of Science and Industry Machine EDSAC reconstruction First used 1949 Conservation Ongoing Location The National Museum of Computing Machine Harwell Dekatron / WITCH restoration First used 1951 Conservation 2012 Location The National Museum of Computing Machine Pegasus restoration First used 1959 Conservation 2014 Restoration terminated Location Science Museum and Manchester Museum of Science and Industry Machine ICT 1301 / Flossie restoration First used 1962 Conservation 2004-2012 Location In storage at The National Museum of Computing Machine Elliott 803 restoration First used 1962 Conservation Ongoing Location The National Museum of Computing Machine ICL 2966 restoration First used 1985 Conservation Ongoing Location The National Museum of Computing Media Enquiries Stephen Fleming for the Computer Conservation Society Palam Communications 01635 299116 s.fleming(a)palam.co.uk<mailto:s.fleming@palam.co.uk> School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk<mailto:Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk> PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/staff/profile/brian.randell

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The pivot to positivity
by Thomas Haigh 14 Oct '14

14 Oct '14

Hello everyone, Bernard makes a good point that we should be careful not to appear curmudgeonly by focusing only on mistakes and problems made by non-members. That goes not just for public outreach, which is a longer term project, but also for new members who have joined the list over the last few days. Jason Gallo, our VC of Operations, just shared the news that 34 new people have joined in the past four days pushing our membership to about 400. Let's take that energy and push it in a positive direction. So here are some of the things SIGCIS is doing right now that we could use your help with. . The annual workshop is coming up next month and our program is online. http://www.sigcis.org/workshop14 Please attend! And please submit something yourself for next year's workshop. . We are making ten travel awards to graduate students to help them present at the workshop. http://www.sigcis.org/travelaward We don't have much money to do this with. Please consider donating. https://associations.press.jhu.edu/shot-app/contribute. For larger gifts, particularly in support of our forthcoming Mahoney Prize for an outstanding article, there is http://www.sigcis.org/mahoney. . Another way we fund the student travel is by auctioning spare copies of books at our annual lunch meeting. If you have any books that could be auctioned please bring them to the meeting or mail them to me. . Our syllabus repository is a great resources for people teaching in the area. http://www.sigcis.org/syllabi It also needs updating. If you have taught any course with significant history of IT content please contribute your syllabus by sending it to Chris Leslie along with permission to post it on our site. <mailto:chris.leslie@nyu.edu> chris.leslie(a)nyu.edu Good for you, good for the community. . Evan Koblentz evan(a)snarc.net and Rebecca Slayton <rs849(a)cornell.edu> have set up a working group to consider what SIGCIS can do, particularly in terms of our website, to improve interactions between journalists and the history of computing community. . If you publish or discover something that our members would be interested in, don't be shy. Tell them about it with an announcement to members(a)sigcis.org. . Our resource guide at http://www.sigcis.org/resources is useful, but also out of date and in need of broadening. Ramesh Subramanian is coordinating a process to update and expand it. If you would like to take part, contact <mailto:ramesh.subramanian@quinnipiac.edu> ramesh.subramanian(a)quinnipiac.edu. . Like SIGCIS on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SIGCIS) and follow @SIGCIS on Twitter. Then post on our wall or tweet about us. . SIGCIS is always looking for new volunteers, for example to help out with the 2015 workshop or to set up ad-hoc initiatives in particular areas. Last but not least, if you are a new member then welcome to SIGCIS! Best wishes, Tom

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