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March 2016

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Video, transcript, and storify of "Working on ENIAC: The Lost Labors of the Information Age" at MITH
by Thomas Haigh 01 Mar '16

01 Mar '16

Hello SIGCIS, I'm trying not to spam you, but did want to let everyone know what a great job the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities <http://mith.umd.edu/> (MITH) did with preserving the talk I gave there with Mark Priestley last month. Thanks to Matthew Kirschenbaum and his colleagues at Maryland for inviting us. As well as a video of the talk "Working on ENIAC: The Lost Labors of the Information Age (https://vimeo.com/156284034) there is also a transcript of the whole thing, including discussion (http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/working-on-eniac-lost-labors-informat ion-age/) and a storify to capture the tweeting (https://storify.com/digdialog/thomas-haigh-mark-priestley-digital-dialogue- at-mi). One of the aspects of the book that we try to bring out in this talk is the variety of kinds of work that went into the ENIAC project. At the end of the talk we challenge the tendency to remember the first six ENIAC operators, hired in mid-1945, only as "programmers" which seems to implicitly dismiss most of their work as not worth remembering. We also remember the dozens of women who actually built ENIAC in 1944 and 1945, whose names are preserved only in the project's accounting and personnel records. There's also some bashing of Walter Isaacson and his "hackers, geeks and geniuses" view of history, which ties in with the new "Maintainers" project that Lee Vinsel and Andy Russell have been advancing. I'm not claiming that this focus on computing as work breaks any new ground in the history of computing as a whole, but (with the notable exceptions of Jen Light's "When Computers were Women," Atsushi Akera's Calculating a Natural World, and the opening chapter of Janet Abbate's _Recoding Gender_) work on ENIAC and the other early machines of the 1940s was mostly conducted early in the development of our field and is concerned with firsts and inventions rather than labor and use. The era seems to loom ever larger in popular awareness (Isaacson, Dyson, and millions of inspirational tweets) even as our community has largely moved on to later time periods. We're also excited to learn that a Japanese translation is well underway, and will be published soon with Kyoritsu Shuppan. Also, while Amazon is not currently discounting the English edition, Barnes and Nobel will sell you a copy for just $29.22 with free shipping. Full details on the book at www.eniacinaction.com <http://www.eniacinaction.com> . Best wishes, Tom

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Wes Clark's arrangements
by Evan Koblentz 01 Mar '16

01 Mar '16

Wes' daughter said it is okay to share this: A memorial service is being planned for Friday, March 4, 2016 at 1:00pm Eastern time (10 AM Pacific time) at Brooklyn Heights Synagogue, 131 Remsen Street, Brooklyn. The service will be live-streamed from the sanctuary at: http://www.bhsbrooklyn.org/livestream/ It will be recorded and available for watching for some time after the actual event. After the service, there will be a reception at the synagogue. In lieu of flowers, the families suggest donations to Washington University, 1 Brookings Drive, Box 1202, St. Louis, MO 63130

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