November 2022 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

SIGCIS 2022 CFP: UNDER CONSTRUCTION | Due June 1
by Laine Nooney 30 Jan '24

30 Jan '24

Dear SIGCIS Community, The SIGCIS Conference Organizing Committee is pleased to *announce the CFP for our 2022 SIGCIS Conference, **UNDER CONSTRUCTION*. Our keynote for the event is Lilly Irani <https://quote.ucsd.edu/lirani/>, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. The SIGCIS Conference will take place *November 13th, 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, *on the Sunday of the SHOT conference. *Abstracts are due June 1.* Below you can find the full CFP for this year's conference. The CFP can also be viewed as a Google doc here <https://bit.ly/388L3Zk>, or at our conference website: meetings.sigcis.org. Please circulate widely, and we hope to see you at SIGCIS! -Laine Nooney, Morgan G. Ames, Stephanie Dick, and Xiaochang Li -------------------------------------------------------------- *UNDER CONSTRUCTION* *New Orleans, LA, US | November 13, 2022* The Special Interest Group in Computing, Information, and Society [SIGCIS] welcomes submissions to their annual conference meetings.sigcis.org Proposal Due Date: June 1, 2022 KEYNOTE SPEAKER Lilly Irani Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies University of California, San Diego THEME A shovel strikes dirt in one country, and the Internet goes out in another. Data centers are cooled by local water supplies, fiber-optic cable follows the sightlines left by railroads and telegraph, global hardware semiconductor supplies depend on the labor of rare earth mineral miners: somehow computing always needs more. The past ten years, in particular, have exhibited a perilous turn in the political economy of computing, as software became service, programming became agile, and storage became cloud. This new regime is driven by an accelerated mode of iterative software development that increasingly relies on post-sales bug fixes, security patches, and performance upgrades, producing a litany of products and services whose endless failures aid some and threaten others. From the communities subject to such “innovation” to the shadow workers paid to “be” artificial intelligence to the coders pushing ambient updates by the millions, risk hums through it all. Computation today is locked in a state of perpetual beta testing, forever promising “improved” features—just don’t ask when it will end, and don’t ask who’s doing the work. In the meantime, these new standards of practice generate new labor and resource demands, new forms of risk, and new challenges for accountability and intervention alike. Yet the patched and partial nature of computing isn’t new. Computing is infrastructure, requiring its own forms of construction and maintenance throughout its history, whether tearing up roads, detangling spaghetti code, or hastily soldering circuits. These are metaphors for history too: what better encapsulates the sentiment of doing history, than the feeling that it will never be done? For historians of information and computing itself, such anxieties are particularly acute due to the objects under examination: constant upgrades, absent documentation, planned obsolescence, the failure of historic hardware. For every line of code we save, hundreds, thousands, disappear. As we work to make sense of our contemporary conditions, how does the undone quality of history affect our ability to tell it? The 2022 SIGCIS Conference, convening in-person in New Orleans on November 13 following the SHOT Annual Meeting, invites scholars, museum and archive professionals, journalists, IT practitioners, artists, and independent researchers across the disciplinary spectrum to submit abstracts related to the historical conditions of computing. We are especially interested in (but not limited to) work that relates to the theme of construction, maintenance, and labor, broadly and imaginatively construed. Areas of engagement may include: - Maintenance and infrastructure in the history of computing and information tech - Historically-oriented approaches to the platform and gig economies - Computing as a site of labor struggle - Networks, borders, boundaries - Computational models of resistance: obfuscation, open-source, hacking, going “off grid” - Government’s historic role in the construction of computing industries and infrastructure - Communitarian and utopian applications of computing - Updates, upgrades, failures, and bugs - Modding, re-using, recycling, afterlives - Archival and curatorial practices and methods - Oral history, memory, forgetting - The limits of historical representation SIGCIS is especially welcoming of new directions in scholarship. We maintain an inclusive atmosphere for scholarly inquiry, supporting disciplinary interventions from beyond the traditional history of technology and promoting diversity in STEM. We welcome submissions from: the histories of technology, computing, information, and science; science and technology studies; oral history and archival studies; critical studies of big data and machine learning; studies of women, gender, and sexuality; studies of race, ethnicity, and postcoloniality; film, media, and game studies; software and code studies; network and internet histories; music, sound studies, and art history; and all other applicable domains. The annual SIGCIS Conference begins immediately after the regular annual meeting of our parent organization, the Society for the History of Technology [SHOT]. Information about the annual SHOT conference can be found at: https://bit.ly/3Nswik2 SUBMISSION FORMATS SIGCIS welcomes proposals for individual 15-20 minute papers, 3-4 paper panel proposals, and non-traditional proposals such as roundtables, software demonstrations, art and music performances, hands-on workshops, etc. SUBMISSION PROCEDURES Submissions are due June 1, 2022 via Google form: <https://forms.gle/C8ixar9s3JsCXq8d9>https://forms.gle/sLRowEDz6QitKCfv9. Submissions require: - 300-350 word abstract, summary, or prospectus (as appropriate for the submission type). Full panel proposals should additionally include 200-250 word abstracts for each paper that will be part of the panel. - 100-150 word bios for each participant If you are submitting a co-presented paper, pre-constituted panel, or other submission involving multiple participants, please only have one person submit for the group; contact and professional information for other participants can be included in the Bio submission section. Questions about the submission process should be sent to: xiaochang.li(a)stanford.edu. COSTS/REGISTRATION While last year’s online conference was pay-what-you-can, hosting an in-person event incurs costs related to room and A/V rental, catering, etc. These costs are subsidized in part by our parent organization, SHOT, but participants should expect registration fees in the range of $45-50 for SHOT attendees and $90-120 for those only attending Sunday SIGCIS Conference (we list these rates in good faith, but they are subject to change). Attending SHOT has its own registration costs. TRAVEL AND CARE GRANTS As a new initiative, SIGCIS will be offering grants to support travel expenses and/or expenses related to child, elder, and other forms of care for presenters whose responsibilities at home may present a barrier to in-person participation. The top financial priority of SIGCIS is support for graduate students, visiting faculty without institutional travel support, and others who would be unable to attend the meeting without travel assistance. We understand that for some, participation is more contingent on childcare or elder care, and as such we are opening up these grants to provide that form of support as well. There is no separate application form, though depending on the volume of requests and available resources we may need to contact you for further information before making a decision. Any award offered is contingent on registering for and attending the SIGCIS Conference. Please note that SHOT does not classify the SIGCIS Conference as participation in the SHOT annual meeting, so acceptance by SIGCIS does not imply eligibility for the SHOT travel grant program. ACCESSIBILITY ACCOMMODATIONS REQUESTS The submission Google form will include a field where individuals may make requests for accessibility accommodations. Since our event is coordinated by our parent organization, SHOT, we cannot guarantee our ability to meet all accommodation requests. However, our intent will always be to advocate to meet the accessibility needs of our participants. SIGCIS MEETINGS ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Laine Nooney, New York University (SIGCIS Vice-Chair of Meetings) Morgan Ames, University of California, Berkeley Stephanie Dick, Simon Fraser University Xiaochang Li, Stanford University ---- Laine Nooney <http://www.lainenooney.com/> MCC <http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> @ NYU <http://www.nyu.edu/> Assistant Professor -Need to make an appt? Click, don't email: https://bit.ly/2GIHuK0 -Probably typed by voice recognition, so please cherish typos

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Percy Ludgate and Konrad Zuse
by Brian Randell 05 Dec '22

05 Dec '22

Hi: I assumed that after the recent celebration in Dublin of the centenary of Percy Ludgate's death (https://www.scss.tcd.ie/SCSSTreasuresCatalog/literature/TCD-SCSS-V.20221015…) when I drew the short straw and was the member of Brian Coghlan's team investigating Ludgate who was tasked with speaking, I would be able to reduce greatly the time I was spending on Ludgate. Instead, the day before the ceremony, we were alerted by Ralf Buelow to his Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum blog post (https://blog.hnf.de/percy-ludgate-der-unbekannte-computerpionier/) which revealed to us that Ludgate's work on an "Analytical Machine" had been used, in 1960, to attack Konrad Zuse's attempts at patenting the concept of program-controlled digital computer - work that was one of the reasons that Zuse was denied a patent. This attack was by the Triumph office machinery company, citing Ludgate's 1909 paper on his Analytical Machine. The question which intrigues us is how did Triumph and its patent attorney find out about the little-known Irish inventor? (Konrad Zuse later claimed that the company had received help from IBM - we have established that Triumph's patent attorney also worked for IBM.) Since we received this blog post we have been investigating records of Zuse's patent efforts, and trying to find out how news of Ludgate reached Triumph. In so doing we have found that there was significantly more awareness in the USA in the 1930s of Ludgate's work than we had suspected - in particular that a full reference to his 1909 paper was included a 1938 bibliography by Irwen Travis, a colleague of John Mauchly at the Moore School, who in 1946 gave a talk on the history of computers at the famous Moore School Lectures. One of the major sources we would like to be able to search are the voluminous records of the ENIAC patent litigation (1967-1973), since at the trial a number of the witnesses testified regarding their careers and knowledge of early computer developments, as well as any involvement in ENIAC. These records are at the Charles Babbage Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Computer History Museum. However, these very important records are not fully indexed, and not available online, leave alone as searchable PDFs. (If only a project to generate such an online resource could be resourced and undertaken!) We would be pleased to hear from anyone who has detailed knowledge of these ENIAC records, and could guide our efforts to check whether they contain any references to Ludgate's work. Indeed, more generally, we would welcome any information leading to the discovery of other pre-1960 references to Ludgate, beyond the one we are aware of in Maurice Wilkes' book Automatic Digital Computers (Methuen, 1956). Cheers Brian Randell — School of Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = https://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/staff/profile/brianrandell.html

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NRL LASR 10th anniversary
by Jonathan Coopersmith 26 Nov '22

26 Nov '22

FYI: The Naval Research Laboratory Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR) is hosting a live/virtual celebration with roundtables, tours, and a party with robots on December 5-6. For more information, see the attached flyer. Stay sane, Jonathan Jonathan Coopersmith Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science Professor (retired) Department of History Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4236 979.739.4708 (cell) 979.862.4314 (fax) It's taking longer to vote - especially if you are Black or Hispanic <https://theconversation.com/its-taking-more-time-to-cast-a-ballot-in-us-ele…>, theconversation.com October 13, 2022 “The thought leader’s thought leader,” (interview with Norman Augustine) <https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/departments/the-thought-leaders-thought-l….> *Aerospace America* October 2022. Preserving space archives: https://www.toboldlypreserve.space/ *FAXED. The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine* (Johns Hopkins University Press)

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What inspired Bush's Memex?
by Koblentz, Evan 15 Nov '22

15 Nov '22

Does anyone have documentation, or good theories, about how/where Vannevar Bush was inspired to develop his ideas for the speculative Memex? I know that he was privy to the latest computer developments, but how did he make the jump from plugboards and punch cards to a virtual encyclopedia and hypertext?

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ACM conference program query - thanks to all
by Janet Abbate 15 Nov '22

15 Nov '22

Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond to my query about ACM conference programs—I’m very appreciative! I haven’t been able to locate this particular conference program yet, although some others are archived at CBI. In case anyone's curious, I was trying to track down (or at least find a full citation for) the speech by Edward F. Moore referenced in a letter to the editor of CACM (5:1 1962, p6) by Larry E. Travis of SDC: "Serious injustice will be done if E. F. Moore's attack on artificial intelligence research, in his speech "Is Artificial Intelligence Just Around the Corner?" at the 1961 National ACM Conference, remains publicly unanswered. In this speech he impugned the integrity, intelligence, and competence of scientists working on problems of artificial intelligence, referring to them as pseudo-scientists and classing them with alchemists.” It sounds like quite a colorful speech, and I would have liked to see the context in which it was given. best, Janet Dr. Janet Abbate Professor, Science, Technology and Society Virginia Tech Co-director, VT National Capital Region STS program liberalarts.vt.edu/sts www.facebook.com/VirginiaTechSTS https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/stsconnect/

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Microsoft Research: PhD Internships / Sociotechnical Perspectives
by danah boyd 14 Nov '22

14 Nov '22

Hi y'all! Great to see many of you this weekend. Microsoft Research has a bunch of internship programs each summer, but one is especially targeted for advanced PhD students who want to work with social scientists (namely me, Mary Gray, Nancy Baym, and Tarleton Gillespie). You can find the full deets here: https://socialmediacollective.org/smc-internships/ but I'm attaching a teaser below. Please forward this to students you think might find it of interest! PS: Internships are for current PhD students but we're also hiring postdocs <https://socialmediacollective.org/smc-postdocs/> for next year for newly minted doctors!! ---- Microsoft Research New England is looking for advanced Ph.D. students interested in bringing sociotechnical perspectives to analyze critical issues of our time. Interns will join a group of social scientists using empirical and critical methods to study the social, political, and cultural dynamics that shape technologies and their consequences. Our work draws on and spans several disciplines such as anthropology, communication, gender and sexuality studies, history, information studies, law, media studies, organizational and management sciences, science & technology studies, and sociology. Applications are due December 2, 2022. In 2023 we will return to in person internships! Interns will be expected to be physically present and contribute to the daily life of our lab (based in Cambridge, MA). We are also excited to once again welcome applicants from outside North America.   We are especially interested in candidates bringing sociotechnical approaches to the study of such topics as: - race, caste, and Indigeneity; gender and sexual identities; socioeconomic status and class; and the intersectional dimensions of identity as they are entangled with sociotechnical systems; - how institutions, organizations, networks, and infrastructures (across sectors and domains) configure and are configured by sociotechnical systems; - notions of cooperation, mutual aid, and community engagement and their relationships to governance and responsible technologies; - political economies and emerging organizational forms in digital labor, community, government, non-profit, creator economy, and private-sector contexts; - the politics and public responsibilities of algorithms, platforms, AI, machine learning, metrics, and other manifestations of computational cultures. The questions our researchers are currently focused on include: - How are people’s expectations of work changing and how does that intersect with the rise of the creator and gig economies? (Nancy Baym) - What makes data legitimate in contexts as varied as government, civil society, and industry? (danah boyd) - How do platforms and other algorithmic intermediaries, through their design and policies, govern public discourse? (Tarleton Gillespie) - What are the cultural, political, and ethical implications of digital systems as new forms and sites of semi-automated, globally-distributed digital sites of identities, work, and human rights? (Mary L. Gray) To understand more about the responsibilities, qualifications, application process, timeline, and other deets, head on over to our blog post: https://socialmediacollective.org/smc-internships/

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SHOT FOIA roundtable tomorrow morning
by Meg Leta Jones 11 Nov '22

11 Nov '22

Hi friends! If you're in New Orleans, come bring a coffee to hang out with me and danah boyd in Bayside A on the 4th Floor. We're going to be discussing freedom of information requests as a method of historical research and source of historical record. Please bring your FOIA experiences and/or come to learn from others! Hope to see you there- Meg + danah ----- Meg Leta Jones, J.D., Ph.D. Communication, Culture & Technology Associate Professor Ethics Lab Faculty Fellow Science, Technology, & International Affairs Core Faculty Institute for Technology Law & Policy Affiliate Faculty Georgetown University Meg.Jones(a)Georgetown.edu MegLeta.com <http://megleta.com/> Author of *Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten <http://nyupress.org/books/9781479881703/>* (NYU Press, 2016)

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Anyone for dinner at SHOT tomorrow (Saturday)?
by thomas.haigh＠gmail.com 11 Nov '22

11 Nov '22

Hello SIGCIS, For those of you attending the SHOT/SIGCIS events in New Orleans currently, I was wondering if anyone would like to get together for an informal dinner tomorrow (Saturday night). In days of yore when I first took over as SIGCIS chair I would always put out a call for historians of computing who were interested in going out for a dinner on one of the nights. Particularly helpful for first timers, and others who wanted a space to chat outside the formal events. Then once we started up the Sunday workshops that shifted to a dinner after the workshop sessions for those staying overnight. Today there is so much more computing related material at SHOT that somebody looking for people with shared interests is likely to have trouble finding people to talk to via the usual process of mingling. Still, looking at the program I see that there is no official banquet, just an "Awards and fellowships reception" from 5:30 to 6:30 (followed by awards presentations and a speech by Donald MacKenzie until 7:45). So I though to review the custom of an open dinner invitation in an entirely non-official capacity. If you want to join a small group for dinner and maybe a walk around town, just reply to this email by the end of the day and let me know if you'd prefer to meet at 6:30 or at 7:45. Also any specific dietary requirements. If there are more than a couple of people interested I will see about making a reservation tomorrow morning. For those of you not here in person: this is a great conference and it is so good to be back after two years of cancelled SHOT meetings. I hope you can join us another year. Best wishes, Tom

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Tenure track search in history/sociology of computing at Stevens
by Andrew Russell 10 Nov '22

10 Nov '22

[Forwarded at the request of Alex Wellerstein, who is cc’d here. Please send questions to him] Job posting (TT) at Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ) Full job description and application: https://stevens.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job/Hoboken-NJ---Main-Campus… • Full-time, tenure-track, Assistant Professor position in the Program on Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. • "The ideal candidate will be a historian or sociologist of technology whose research and teaching centers on topics in the history of computing or information technology." • Candidates must hold a Ph.D. (or be ABD) in a field relevant to Science & Technology Studies including, but not limited to, History of Science and/or Technology; Sociology of Science and/or Technology; and Science, Technology, and Society. • Preferred candidates will have a historical specialization and proven track record of historical research. Qualitative sociologists with historical dimensions to their research are also encouraged to apply. The candidate must be capable of teaching undergraduate survey courses on the History of Science and/or Technology, as well as an undergraduate course on the subject of “Computers and Society.” • Preference will also be given to candidates whose work embraces interdisciplinary themes, digital scholarship, and/or public outreach. • Stevens Institute of Technology is located in Hoboken, NJ, directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan. • Candidates interested in applying should prepare an application that includes a letter of application, current C.V., a brief (2-page max) statement of research plans, a brief (2-page max) statement of teaching philosophy, a diversity statement, and the names and contact information for three referees (letters will only be solicited before campus visits). Please combine all materials into a single PDF document for submission. • Please feel free to contact search chair Alex Wellerstein<mailto:awellers@stevens.edu> with any questions. • Review of applications will begin on 9 Jan. 2023 and continue until the position is filled. -- Alex Wellerstein Associate Professor and Director, Science and Technology Studies program Stevens Institute of Technology 1 Castle Point Terrace College of Arts and Letters Hoboken, NJ 07030-5991 Office tel: 201-216-8534 (x8534) Office: Morton 337 Web: https://alexwellerstein.com<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Falexwelle…> Blog: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.nucle…> Book: https://book.nuclearsecrecy.com<https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbook.nucl…>

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Labor Tech Research Network's launch at 4S
by Karina Rider 10 Nov '22

10 Nov '22

Join Labor Tech Research Network at our Launch Events in Cholula, Mexico at 4S on Friday, December 9th! We are thrilled to invite you to the launch of Labor Tech Research Network<http://labortechresearchnetwork.org/> at the 2022 Annual Meeting for the Society of Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference in Cholula, Mexico! Labor Tech is an interdisciplinary, transnational group of the thinkers and activists on the intersection of digitization and work, broadly. Labor Tech recently transitioned from a private discussion group to a public-facing nonprofit working on research, education, and advocacy, with many of our members part of the 4S community. With a day of events on Friday December 9th, we will introduce our current activities, members, and mission to the conference and our community. Please join us on Friday, December 9 for three back-to-back events! Session 1: Panel for Labor Tech Research Network Launch Day: Friday, Dec 9 Time: 11:00am-1:00pm Location: Building D: D008 In this first session, we will introduce our initiatives, including our Book Series with MIT Press, and we will announce winners of our inaugural Book Award and Graduate Student Paper Award. This introduction will be followed by a panel discussion on our core themes of labor, technology, feminism, decolonialism, and anti-racism in the context of Latin America led by: * Paola Ricaurte, Department of Media and Digital Culture, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City * Liliana Gil, Department of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research * Verónica Uribe del Aguila, Communication and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego Want to attend this event virtually? Register in advance as an Attendee<https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/registration/> on the 4S website (fee of $15-20) Session 2: Unconference for Labor Tech Research Network Launch Day: Friday, Dec 9 Time: 2:00-4:00pm Location: Building D: D008 As our second session, we will offer an informal participatory discussion of Labor Tech commitments and keywords, like: Affect, AI, Algorithms, Data-driven, Precarity, Digital Activism, Social justice, Transnational, etc. In this unconference format, several tables will be dedicated to particular themes, with conversation facilitated by Labor Tech members. The goal is to map Labor Tech's future and our community at 4S. Come join us to meet other people interested in labor and technology, and hear about their interests, research, and advocacy. Party 4:00-6:00pm: Join us for Snacks and Socializing! Location to be determined (hopefully at a restaurant near the conference site) Want to help fund these events? Please contribute to our GoFundMe<https://www.gofundme.com/f/labortech-research-network>! -- Karina Rider, PhD Postdoctoral Researcher Social Media Collective, Microsoft Research New England @kaareeenah // karinarider.wordpress.com Donate to the Labor Tech Research Network’s GoFundMe!<https://www.gofundme.com/f/labortech-research-network?utm_campaign=p_cp+sha…>

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