March 2022 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Play about Ada and Babbage
by Ceruzzi, Paul 21 Mar '22

21 Mar '22

This message is a little late, and it may appeal only to those of you in the DC area, although I believe the play will be staged in other cities. I haven't seen it yet but plan to next week. A play about Ada Augusta and Charles Babbage: https://avantbard.org/project/ada-and-the-engine/ [https://avantbard.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ada2.jpg]<https://avantbard.org/project/ada-and-the-engine/> Ada and The Engine - Avant Bard Theatre<https://avantbard.org/project/ada-and-the-engine/> >From prolific playwright Lauren Gunderson, Ada and the Engine is a whimsical scientific history sure to delight audiences. avantbard.org Paul Ceruzzi

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15th CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Research Methods in New York City
by Renzo Taddei 21 Mar '22

21 Mar '22

*Apologies for cross-posting. A few places are still available.* *15th CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Research Methods in New York City* Online: June 20 to July 1, 2022 – 9 AM to 12 PM EDT On-site in New York City: July 18 to 29, 2022 – 9 AM to 12 PM EDT [image: image.png] The Comitas Institute for Anthropological Study (CIFAS) is pleased to announce the 15th CIFAS Field School in Ethnographic Research Methods. In 2022, the course will take place in two sessions: one in an online format at the end of June and another returning to its face-to-face modality, in New York City, in July (provided sanitary conditions allow). The goal of the Field School is to offer training in the foundations and practice of ethnographic methods. The faculty works closely with participants to identify the required field methods needed to address their academic or professional needs. The Field School is suitable for graduate and undergraduate students in social sciences and other fields of study that use qualitative approaches (such as education, communication, cultural studies, health, social work, human ecology, development studies, consumer behavior, among others), applied social scientists, professionals, and researchers who have an interest in learning more about ethnographic methods and their applications. *Program:* - Foundations of ethnographic research - Theory and practice: social theories in the field - Research design - Data collection techniques - Planning the logistics of field research - Digital ethnography - Ethnography in interface with Social Network Analysis and other trends in the field of the digital humanities - Ethnography in specific fields of activity (applied social sciences, health, social service, environmental studies, public policy design, business, and others) - Principles of organization and indexation of field data - Analyzing field data; qualitative analysis software packages: basic principles The total workload of the course is 30 hours. In this edition of the summer school, the option of earning credits is not available. Places are limited. The tuition fee is US$ 1,200. *Comitas Field School Fellowship:* a limited amount of fellowships are available to students from underrepresented minorities and low-income countries. See information on how to apply at the end of the application form. The application should be completed online *here* <http://cifas.us/field-school-registration-form/>. For more information, please see https://cifas.us/field-school/ or email us at fieldschool(a)cifas.us.

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Historical Computing Machines Series Volumes
by STEPHEN KAISLER 19 Mar '22

19 Mar '22

Folks: Over the past four years, I have published six volumes in my Historical Computing Machines Series through Cambridge Scholars publishing of Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. These books are available through their website: https://cambridgescholars.com The six volumes to date are: Birthing the Computer: From Relays to Vacuum Tubes Birthing the Computer: From Drums to Cores First Generation Mainframes: The IBM 700 Series Second Generation Mainframes: The IBM 7000 Series Mainframe Computer Systems: The General Electric Corporation The Univac Corporation: In From The Beginning The next book in the series: The Burroughs Corporation: Innovation in Architecture, will be submitted in a few week. The next books in the series are anticipated to be (tentative titles): Mainframe Computer Systems: Honeywell Incorporated Control Data Corporation: Speed and More Speed I continue to search for manuals, documents, reports, etc. that can help me provide an accurate picture of these machines that have contributed to the development of Computer Science and Information Processing. Steve Kaisler, D.Sc.

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Swansea Uni hiring
by Troy Astarte 18 Mar '22

18 Mar '22

Hi folks, The Department of Computer Science at Swansea University is hiring a number of full-time, permanent academic positions<https://www.swansea.ac.uk/jobs-at-swansea/current-vacancies/?Resultsperpage…> (link to all). Many of them are in a specific discipline of CS (e.g. cyber security) but there are some which are open to any discipline. Swansea has a research theme in Educational, Historical, and Philosophical Foundations of Computing<https://www.swansea.ac.uk/compsci/research-and-impact/educational-historica…> which due to administrative error was left off the job advert (we’re trying to get this fixed). The Department is actively seeking to improve its research and teaching offering in this area and we would love to attract candidates with this expertise. This is particularly important as we develop a BSc in Digital Technology<https://www.swansea.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/coming-soon/#digital-techno…> which will teach students much more about the context, history, and social impact of technology than a conventional CS course. To make this offering excellent we really want to hire more staff with research in these areas—hence my posting on this list! Post links: Lecturer (Teaching pathway): £35–41k<https://www.swansea.ac.uk/jobs-at-swansea/current-vacancies/details/?nPosti…>. Closing date 2022-04-04 (apologies for the short notice). Lecturer/Senior lecturer (Research pathway): £35–50k<https://www.swansea.ac.uk/jobs-at-swansea/current-vacancies/details/?nPosti…>. Closing date 2022-04-24. Senior lecturer/Associate Professor (Research pathway): £42–60k<https://www.swansea.ac.uk/jobs-at-swansea/current-vacancies/details/?nPosti…>. Closing date 2022-04-24. I am happy to field informal enquiries about the EHP / DT aspects, though for most enquiries there is contact info for the heads of department and school in the job listings. Apologies if you see this email multiple times. Best, Dr. Troy Kaighin Astarte (they/them / nhw) Lecturer, Computer Science / Darlithydd, Cyfrifiadureg Swansea University / Prifysgol Abertawe For students: my office hours are Wednesday (online) and Friday (CoFo 407 & online), 10–1100. I fyfyrwyr: fy oriau swyddfa yw dydd Mercher (ar-lein) a dydd Gwener (CoFo 407 ac ar-lein), 10–1100. https://swanseauniversity.zoom.us/my/t.k.astarte Every email has a cost to the climate. Please think before sending short emails. Mae gan bob e-bost gost i’r hinsawdd. Meddyliwch cyn i chi anfon e-byst byr.

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] The Communicators
by Patrick McCray 17 Mar '22

17 Mar '22

Hi! Lee was very gracious in describing my new book project…and he pretty much nailed it. I’m hoping to use a selection of books published after 1945 as windows into the histories of computing, technology, publishing. The project’s under contract with MIT Press and, with archives slowly opening up, I’m hoping to do a few final research trips and polish it off. We’ll see… Patrick -- W. Patrick McCray Professor, Department of History COORDINATES: Department of History University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410 Phone (office): (805) 893-2665 Web (official): http://www.history.ucsb.edu/people/person.php?account_id=14 Web (personal): http://www.patrickmccray.com <http://www.patrickmccray.com/> Twitter: @LeapingRobot <https://twitter.com/leapingrobot?lang=en> My new book - Making Art Work <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/making-art-work> - is out with The MIT Press > On Mar 17, 2022, at 10:12 AM, Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Hey, bud. I doubt you'll learn anything from the various responses this email has received, but I wanted to make you aware of it in case you miss it otherwise. > > > > ---------- Forwarded message --------- > From: Evan Koblentz <evank(a)njit.edu <mailto:evank@njit.edu>> > Date: Thu, Mar 17, 2022 at 10:58 AM > Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] The Communicators > To: members(a)SIGCIS.org <members(a)sigcis.org <mailto:members@sigcis.org>> > > > I’m interested in a new-to-me research angle: the people who changed computing by writing about it. > > > > Lovelace comes to mind. So do Vannevar Bush and Edmund Berkeley. > > > > Who else should I consider from prior to 1965? (I have the microcomputer generation covered.) > Are there existing papers on this subject? > > > <image001.png> <https://www.njit.edu/> > Evan A Koblentz > Staff Writer, Office of Strategic Communications > Adjunct Instructor, Ying Wu College of Computing > evan.a.koblentz(a)njit.edu <mailto:evan.a.koblentz@njit.edu> • (973) 596-3065 <tel:9735963065> > https://web.njit.edu/~evank > <https://web.njit.edu/~evank%0b>@TechnicallyEvan <https://twitter.com/technicallyevan> > > > _______________________________________________ > This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://sigcis.org/>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org <http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org> > > -- > Associate Professor > Department of Science, Technology, and Society > Virginia Tech > leevinsel.com <http://leevinsel.com/> > @STS_News

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How did human computers support the early growth of industry?
by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo 16 Mar '22

16 Mar '22

I assume not many members will read the blog of the Economic History Society, but the content seems relevant to this forum Best Bernardo Northumbria (UK) & Anahuac (Mexico) Cyberpunk Victoria https://ehs.org.uk/cyberpunk-victoria/

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Obit: Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer • The Register
by Brian E Carpenter 13 Mar '22

13 Mar '22

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/12/obit_mary_coombs/

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New Perspectives on Telephone Network Switching
by Sebastian Gießmann 10 Mar '22

10 Mar '22

Hello SIGCIS, this is happening today at 1200 EST, over at SHOT's Mercurians. If you would like to join us, you are very much welcome! Join Zoom Meeting https://ieee.zoom.us/j/93593784254?pwd=SkdHSHZIMVpIK2hYTDJOc2Rnc2hXdz09 Meeting ID: 935 9378 4254 Passcode: 599082 All the best, Sebastian Giessmann (with Mara Mills and Alexander B. Magoun) ___________________ *New Perspectives on Telephone Network Switching* Brown Bag Tag Team Talk, 10 March 2022 Following the successful initiation of our informal, “brown bag,” scholarly Zoom talks last year, we are continuing with a unique “tag team” format for our first presentation in 2022. On *Thursday, 10 March, at 1200 EST*, Sebastian Giessmann and Mara Mills will share the fruits of their recent archival research to offer new perspectives on a century of telephone network switching. Bring your lunch, breakfast, or dinner to the virtual table, and please share the meeting link obtained from info(a)mercurians.xn--orgprivately-m19f, please–with colleagues interested in telephony or networks, information or media studies, business or labor history, or cyborgs. Sebastian Giessmann, University of Siegen, “The Strowger Gambit: On How (Not) to Automate Telephone Switching” The talk reconstructs the back and forth between early manual and automated telephone switching in the last third of the 19th century. It is part of my ongoing research on cultural techniques of networking. Basically, the narrative will focus on two U.S. cases while keeping European developments in mind. The first one concerns the manual New Haven Telephone Exchange of George W. Coy (1878), which I reconstruct by way of the Southern New England Telephone Company records. A second case in point are the numerous patents and models that proposed automating telephone exchanges, including Almon B. Strowger’s electromechanical apparatus for La Porte, Indiana (1891/92). In both cases, the gendered work of technical mediation–its skills and practices–is decisive. But the translation of manual techniques of the body into infrastructural automation took a twisted and uneasy path. If we follow it closely, we learn about the relations of addressing and networking, and also about telephony’s transformation into digital mediations. Mara Mills, New York University, “Overload: Switchboard Automation and the Disability History of 0s and 1s” This talk considers the early history of digital labor and automation through a focus on the telephone switchboard, to which Claude Shannon famously applied Boolean algebra for streamlining in 1938. Labor historians suggest that operator management issues as much as technical innovation drove switchboard automation after 1913, when the Bell Telephone System consolidated its power as a legally sanctioned monopoly. Thinking alongside Frantz Fanon’s mid-century insights about telephone operators, surveillance capitalism, and overwork, in this talk I highlight another 1913 shift—workers’ compensation for “disability” in New York and in the Bell System—as an overlooked cost and management factor in early automation. Based on my research in the telephone exchange collections at the San Antonio branch of the AT&T archives, and building on the work of Venus Green and Kenneth Lipartito, I suggest that it wasn’t simply increasing salaries and numbers of operators that worried managers. Switchboards were also automated because telephone engineers and telephone exchange managers could not, in the end, standardize operators’ bodies and behavior—or rather, they could not standardize them without causing injury, compensation expenses, and time off of work. After the passage of workers’ compensation laws, as Sarah F. Rose has argued, managers attempted to screen disability out of the workplace, through physical examination of applicants, but these attempts were undermined by other elements of the efficiency paradigm: workload increases, speed-up, and the repetitive strain compelled by machine interaction. A related expense was the cost of the new and compulsory health program, which included pre-employment screenings on a nationwide scale, the hiring of medical staff and the establishment of medical departments in large exchanges across the country, improved sanitation, elaborate safety and training protocols, and payment for sick days, as well as payment of compensation for workplace accidents. We welcome your news! Please email info(a)mercurians.org and include your name and organization, if you are affiliated with one. https://mercurians.org/news-and-announcements/ -- AR Dr. Sebastian Gießmann https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/medienwissenschaft/personal/lehrende/giessma… Sprechstunde DI 17 Uhr:https://u-si.de/PDqYj Raum AH-124 | Zoom | +49 271 740-2586 http://www.sebastiangiessmann.de https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de

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CFP (Please Share) CBI's Virtual Symposium Automation by Design: Politics Culture and Landscape in an Age of Machine That Learn
by Jeffrey Yost 09 Mar '22

09 Mar '22

*Call for Papers <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/Automation-by-Design>--CBI for Computing, Information, and Culture's **Virtual Symposium * *Automation by Design: <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/Automation-by-Design>* *Politics, Culture and Landscape in an Age of Machine That Learn <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/Automation-by-Design>* *Automation by Design* is a global, interdisciplinary, virtual CBI symposium on the politics and culture of digital automation. We welcome papers in a broad range of fields across the humanities and social sciences. These include history, STS, sociology, anthropology, media studies, policy, legal studies, geography, communication, rhetoric, information studies, and philosophy. The platformization of society, fueled by automation and machine learning, impacts IT users in deleterious, discriminatory, democracy-threatening, and at times deadly, ways that intersect and compound. This symposium seeks papers that explore how automation—from its algorithmic and architectural design to its structuring, materiality, maintenance, and use—has developed jointly with social politics. We are especially interested in papers that address education, law, capitalism, labor, science, medicine, leisure, privacy/security, surveillance, the body, and the environment. The event will be a 1.5-day virtual symposium to be held Friday through Saturday, February 17 &18, 2023. Presenting authors agree to submit a draft paper by a deadline preceding the event (to facilitate the delivery of feedback through videoconferencing workshops prior to the event), and a revised paper for consideration to an edited volume to be published with a major academic publisher. To apply: Please send a 300 to 450-word abstract that includes discussion of research themes/questions, methods, and sources and a 2pp. CV. Please send (single PDF) to cbi(a)umn.edu by the *Deadline of April 29, 2022. *(For accepted applicants, papers will be due Jan. 6, 2023). ------------------------------ Program Committee: Dr. Jeffrey Yost ( <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/jeffrey-r-yost-phd>@JeffreyYost6 <https://twitter.com/JeffreyYost6>), CBI Dir. & Res. Prof., HSTM, Univ. of Minnesota <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/jeffrey-r-yost-phd> Dr. Gerardo Con Diaz, Assoc. Prof., STS, Univ. of California, Davis & Stanford Univ. Fellow <https://sts.ucdavis.edu/people/condiaz> Dr. Honghong Tinn, Asst. Prof., HSTM & ECE, Univ. of Minnesota <https://cse.umn.edu/hstm/honghong-tinn> Dr. Colette Perold, Asst. Prof., Media Studies, Univ. of Colorado <https://www.colorado.edu/cmci/people/media-studies/colette-perold> *Please connect: Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-yost-b714566> Twitter <https://twitter.com/jeffreyyost6> CBI-FB <https://www.facebook.com/babbageinstitute> Blockchain & Society FB <https://www.facebook.com/Decentralizedinternet/>* *Jeffrey Yost, Ph.D. @JeffreyYost6* Director, Charles Babbage Institute <http://www.cse.umn.edu/cbi>; Research Professor, HSTM 222 21st Avenue South, University of Minnesota; Minneapolis, MN 55455 *Studies in Computing and Culture book series, Johns Hopkins U. Press * Co-Editor *PI, NSF-funded CBI project "Mining a Useable Past: Perspectives, Paradoxes, and Possibilities with Security and Privacy."* *Blockchain & Society Blog and Site* <https://www.blockchainandsociety.com> (Founder/Leader) *Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/interfaces> *Co-Editor (w/ Amanda Wick) *Committee Member, National Academy of Engineering Extraordinary Engineering Impacts on Society* *Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry (MIT Press) <https://amzn.to/3gqe4R6>*

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FOIA roundtable pitch for SHOT 2022
by Meg Leta Jones 08 Mar '22

08 Mar '22

Hi SIGCIS friends! danah boyd and I are planning to submit a SHOT 2022 proposal for a roundtable discussion of the use of FOIA in the history of technology. FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act used in the U.S. to access (some) government records - most countries around the world have such laws. The roundtable might include provocations like: "Treasure hunting with FOIA" "Harrowing FOIA stories from historians of tech" "FOIA records as evidence: historians beware!" "What about a FOIA for Big Tech" If this sounds like fun or you have any interest in joining us, please reach out so we can compile an initial list of participants. Thanks! Meg (and 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/> iSPYLab.net Author of *Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten <http://nyupress.org/books/9781479881703/>* (NYU Press, 2016)

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