April 2022 - Members - lists.sigcis.org

Reminder Fri. Apr. 29th CBI's "Automation by Design" Deadline for paper proposals
by Jeffrey Yost 25 Apr '22

25 Apr '22

Automation by Design: <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/Automation-by-Design>Politics, Culture, and Landscape in an Age of Machines That Learn <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/Automation-by-Design>CFP--Deadline Friday, April 29th <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/Automation-by-Design> *Automation by Design <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/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. Program Committee: Dr. Jeffrey Yost ( <https://cse.umn.edu/cbi/jeffrey-r-yost-phd> @JustCodeCulture <https://twitter.com/JustCodeCulture>), 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: Twitter <https://twitter.com/justcodeculture> ** Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-yost-b714566>** CBI-FB <https://www.facebook.com/babbageinstitute> Blockchain & Society FB <https://www.facebook.com/Decentralizedinternet/>* *Jeffrey Yost, Ph.D. * 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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Archives of IT Free Webinar - 3 May 19.00 BST
by Research 24 Apr '22

24 Apr '22

Register for the Archives of IT free Webinar 3 May - by kind invitation of the BCS South Wales Branch A whistle stop tour of the Archive will stop off for a deeper look at how Comms and IT has delivered benefits, including Tech for Good - the convergence of Tech with Biology in the last 70 years Entrepreneurial Enterprises - the history of Tech innovation and growth Q&A will allow us to delve into whatever aspect of the Archives you may wish to explore Start 19:00 Close 20:30 - exclusively online and free to all Book here https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2022/may/webinar-an-introduction-to-the… Tom Abram Director - Archives of IT research(a)archivesit.org.uk www.archivesit.org.uk<http://www.archivesit.org.uk/> > Subscribe<https://archivesit.org.uk/sign-up/> to our e-newsletter > Follow us on Twitter @ArchivesIT<https://twitter.com/ArchivesIT> Registered Charity No: 1164198

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Henry G. Rice and APS
by David Nofre 21 Apr '22

21 Apr '22

Dear list, I'm trying to trace back Henry G. Rice's work at Westinghouse Research Labs in the late 1950s on the development of the so-called Automatic Programming System (APS). Rice was trained as a mathematician and logician with Paul C. Rosenbloom at Syracuse and joined Westinghouse labs around 1955/6. From the few sources that I've found it seems that Rice's APS was a language for the Datatron 205 similar to Fortran but making extensive use of Polish notation. Does anybody know if/where I could get more info on Rice and/or APS ? Thanks in advance. David Nofre -- https://www.davidnofre.com/

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2022 Computer History Museum Prize - call for nominations
by Andrew Russell 20 Apr '22

20 Apr '22

Dear colleagues - [Please help us to circulate this call widely, including on mailing lists, social media, and directly to authors and publishers of books about computer history, broadly defined.] Nominations are now open for the 2022 Computer History Museum Prize. Details are available from https://www.sigcis.org/chmprize. Books published in 2019, 2020, and 2021 are eligible for the 2022 prize. Books in translation are eligible for three years following the date of their publication in English. Publishers, authors, and other interested members of the computer history community are invited to nominate books. Please note that books nominated in previous years may be nominated again, provided they have been published in the timeframes specified above. Please send digital and physical copies of the nominated title to each of the committee members listed at https://www.sigcis.org/chmprize, with a postmark no later than May 15, 2022. Please direct any questions to the 2022 committee chair, Jean Kumagai. About the Computer History Museum Prize The Computer History Museum Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding book in the history of computing broadly conceived, published during the prior three years. The prize of $1,000 is awarded by SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society. SIGCIS is part of the Society for the History of Technology. In 2012 the prize was endowed in perpetuity through a generous bequest from the estate of Paul Baran, a legendary computer innovator and entrepreneur best known for his work to develop and promote the packet switching approach on which modern networks are built. Baran was a longtime supporter of work on the history of information technology and named the prize to celebrate the contributions of the Computer History Museum to that field. Many thanks, Andy — — — — — — — — — — — Andrew L. Russell, Ph.D. Dean, College of Arts & Sciences SUNY Polytechnic Institute Donovan Hall - 2123B 100 Seymour Road Utica, NY 13502 t. 315-792-7317 w. https://sunypoly.edu/ e. arussell(a)arussell.org

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call for Mahoney Prize nominations
by Melanie Swalwell 20 Apr '22

20 Apr '22

Hi all, This is an open call for nominations of articles for the 2022 Mahoney Prize. The Mahoney Prize recognizes an outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology, broadly conceived. The Mahoney Prize commemorates the late Princeton scholar Michael S. Mahoney, whose profound contributions to the history of computing came from his many articles and book chapters. The prize consists of a $500 award and a certificate. For the 2022 prize, articles published in the preceding three years (2019, 2020, and 2021) are eligible for nomination. The Mahoney Prize is awarded by the Special Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS) and is presented during the annual meeting of our parent group, the Society for the History of Technology. More information - including on previous winning entries -- is available at https://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize Copies of nominated articles should be emailed to all 4 members of the Prize committee by 7 May 2022. Committee members' emails are listed at the above URL. Regards, Melanie -- Melanie Swalwell Professor of Digital Media Heritage Co-Chair, SIGCIS<http://www.sigcis.org/> Centre for Transformative Media Technologies School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education Swinburne University PO Box 218, Hawthorn Vic 3122 Australia http://transformativemedia.swinburne.edu.au/ Tel +61 3 9214 3911 AS426 mswalwell(a)swin.edu.au @melswal New books out in 2021! Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/homebrew-gaming-and-beginnings-vernacular-di…> Game History and the Local<https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-66422-0>

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Registration: Workshop series "Issues in XAI #4": "Explainable AI: between ethics and epistemology"
by Giorgia Pozzi 19 Apr '22

19 Apr '22

We warmly invite you to participate in the fourth workshop in the interdisciplinary workshop series ‘Issues in explainable AI’, dedicated to exploring the various facets of research on improving our understanding of AI systems. This instalment takes place in Delft from May 23-25 and focuses on the interplay between epistemic challenges of artificial intelligence and the ethical use of artificial intelligence. How can explainability support us when trying to meet the challenges of ethical use? And to what extent are there obligations for AI systems to be explainable? Presentations will explore among other things when explainability is required, how explainability relates to trust, accountability and knowledge, and will consider case studies in health care. Furthermore, four keynotes will be given by Filippo Santoni de Sio, Federica Russo, Judith Simon and Otávio Bueno. All interested participants are welcome, either in person or online. For more details including the program, see the website for the workshop: https://juanmduran.net/xai4/ <https://juanmduran.net/xai4/> Please, find the registration link to attend the workshop (either online or on-site): https://forms.gle/S5zj1SsrKKEpoKFJ9 <https://forms.gle/S5zj1SsrKKEpoKFJ9> Please, consider that we have a limited amount of spots available to attend the conference on-site and these will be assigned on a “first come, first served” basis. The workshop is sponsored by the European Research Infrastructure SoBigData++ (http://sobigdata.eu <http://sobigdata.eu/>), the European Network of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Humane-AI (https://www.humane-ai.eu <https://www.humane-ai.eu/>), KNAW Wetenschapsfondsen Evert Willem Beth Foundation (https://www.knaw.nl/en/awards/funds/evert-willem-beth-stichting <https://www.knaw.nl/en/awards/funds/evert-willem-beth-stichting>), the TU Delft TPM-AI Lab (https://www.tudelft.nl/tbm/tpm-ai-lab <https://www.tudelft.nl/tbm/tpm-ai-lab>), and the Delft Digital Ethics Initiative. This workshop is part of the workshop series “Issues in Explainable AI” (www.explainable-intelligent.systems <http://www.explainable-intelligent.systems/>). If you have any questions regarding the workshop, please contact any of the organizers: Juan M. Durán: j.m.duran(a)tudelft.nl <mailto:j.m.duran@tudelft.nl> Stefan Buijsman: s.n.r.buijsman(a)tudelft.nl <mailto:s.n.r.buijsman@tudelft.nl> Giorgia Pozzi: g.pozzi(a)tudelft.nl <mailto:g.pozzi@tudelft.nl> Jonne Maas: j.j.c.maas(a)tudelft.nl <mailto:j.j.c.maas@tudelft.nl>

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ACM FAccT 2022 Financial Support deadline on April 15th
by FAccT Publicity 13 Apr '22

13 Apr '22

Dear all, This is a reminder for ACM FAccT 2022 Financial Support deadline, coming up on April 15th (deadline extended from April 13th). Please check the website for the submission form and to learn more: https://facctconference.org/2022/scholarships.html Those who lack the means to pay for registration or who cannot afford to travel to attend the conference may apply for financial support, which consists of (1) a registration fee waiver and/or (2) a travel grant. We anticipate high demand for travel grants, and our priority is to ensure that financial need does not prevent people from attending and participating in the conference. Please apply for funding only if you do not have other resources that you can use to support your participation, and please try to source funding from within your own institution if possible. Please also apply for the minimum amount needed to attend the conference (considering travel, hotel, and subsistence costs). Travel grants are offered in two modalities. In modality A. Expense reimbursement paid after the conference, you will be provided a link to an ACM page for uploading your receipts for flight, hotel, ground transportation, meals, and you will be reimbursed for eligible expenses. In modality B. Lump sum paid after the conference, you will be provided a link to an ACM page for indicating your mailing address, permanent address, and national tax ID number; you will be transferred the requested amount and this will be considered as taxable income that you will need to report to your national tax authority. Modality A is strongly preferred by the Organising Committee. Applicants for financial support must justify their need in their application. Grants will be allocated based on consideration of the applicant's contribution to the conference (member of organising committee, presenter in CRAFT or Tutorial session, accepted paper presenter, volunteer), as well as on the importance of growing the FAccT community, and increasing access for populations historically underrepresented in the conference. We can give out a strictly limited number of registration fee waivers. These will be allocated based on the same criteria, but we particularly wish to use fee waivers to encourage participation by members of civil society organisations that would not otherwise be able to attend. Please submit applications as soon as possible and reach out to FAccT contact for any questions. Best, Deb Raji & Annette Zimmermann ACM FAccT Publicity Co-Chairs

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ACM FAccT 2022 Financial Support & Travel Grant Deadline (April 13th) Coming Up!
by FAccT Publicity 12 Apr '22

12 Apr '22

Dear all, This is a reminder for ACM FAccT 2022 Financial Support deadline, coming up on April 13th. Please check the website for the submission form and to learn more [1]. Those who lack the means to pay for registration or who cannot afford to travel to attend the conference may apply for financial support, which consists of (1) a registration fee waiver and/or (2) a travel grant. We anticipate high demand for travel grants, and our priority is to ensure that financial need does not prevent people from attending and participating in the conference. Please apply for funding only if you do not have other resources that you can use to support your participation, and please try to source funding from within your own institution if possible. Please also apply for the minimum amount needed to attend the conference (considering travel, hotel, and subsistence costs). Travel grants are offered in two modalities. In modality A. Expense reimbursement paid after the conference, you will be provided a link to an ACM page for uploading your receipts for flight, hotel, ground transportation, meals, and you will be reimbursed for eligible expenses. In modality B. Lump sum paid after the conference, you will be provided a link to an ACM page for indicating your mailing address, permanent address, and national tax ID number; you will be transferred the requested amount and this will be considered as taxable income that you will need to report to your national tax authority. Modality A is strongly preferred by the Organising Committee. Applicants for financial support must justify their need in their application. Grants will be allocated based on consideration of the applicant's contribution to the conference (member of organising committee, presenter in CRAFT or Tutorial session, accepted paper presenter, volunteer), as well as on the importance of growing the FAccT community, and increasing access for populations historically underrepresented in the conference. We can give out a strictly limited number of registration fee waivers. These will be allocated based on the same criteria, but we particularly wish to use fee waivers to encourage participation by members of civil society organisations that would not otherwise be able to attend. Please submit applications as soon as possible and reach out to FAccT contact for any questions. Best, Deb Raji & Annette Zimmermann ACM FAccT Publicity Co-Chairs Links: ------ [1] https://facctconference.org/2022/scholarships.html

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CfP 4S/ESOCITE 2022 Open Panel: Technologies of Scalable Power: Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing
by Yoehan Oh 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

Dear colleagues, ***Apologies for cross-posting.*** Our panel for 4S/ESOCITE 2022 (Cholula, México; 7-10 December 2022), entitled "Technologies of Scalable Power: Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing," is open for submissions, which is due on Thursday, April 14, 2022. Please find the details below. Please also feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. I look forward to receiving your abstracts! Best regards, Yoehan ---- *CONFERENCE INFORMATION* The 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) / ESOCITE (Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología) 2nd Joint meeting - *Title: *Reunion, recuperation, reconfiguration: Knowledges and technosciences for living together - *Date*: 7-10 December 2022 - *Location*: Cholula, México - *Conference meeting website*: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/ - *Key dates*: https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/key-dates/ *OPEN PANEL INFORMATION* - *Webpage*: https://www.4sonline.org/127-technologies-of-scalable-power-big-data-big-te… - *Call for Abstract *(as below): 127. *Technologies of Scalable Power**: * *Big Data, Big Tech, ‘Cloud’ services, and scalable technoepistemics in global computing* This open panel invites global scholars interested in critical studies of scalability technologies, computing and network architectures, and their epistemic assumptions and infrastructures, which collectively render various computing media scalable. Empirical examples include, but are not limited to: - Cloud computing’s scalable/on-demand architectures - Big data analysis tools (e.g. Hadoop; Stevens 2016) - Distributed and parallel computing systems (e.g. MapReduce, GPU) - microservices (vs. monolithic), Observability, DevOps, AIOps - Open source cloud infrastructure (e.g. OpenStack, Apache CloudStack) Our shared consciousness is threefold. First, thematically/politically, this open panel collectively aims at elaborating on the recent macroscale theses interested in global extractive data practices by a few Big platforms, such as “Data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias 2021) and “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2017; Birch & Cochrane 2021) by focusing on the specificity and technicality of certain computing and media practices in their micro/mesoscale that have provided such global platforms with various kinds of means of scalable growth and expansion in computational, material, operational, and logistic terms. We also interrogate how those practices have reinforced Silicon Valley’s privilege of leading global techno-episteme. We hope our work to contribute to the discussions as to how decolonial and deimperial digital cultures could be conceived of (Asif 2019; Ochigame 2020). Second, epistemologically, this panel means to contribute to works in critical and hermeneutic understandings of computing architectures, programming languages, and its accompanying logistical assumptions and epistemic infrastructures (Malazita 2022) such as Ubiquitous Computing (Dourish & Mainwaring 2012), UNIX’s modular principles with pipeline communications (McPherson 2012), and the success of a Brazil computer scientists-invented programming language in Silicon Valley but not in its homecountry (Takhteyev 2015). Third, methodologically and theoretically, this panel deepens our meta-reflections by ethically and responsibly relying upon existing conceptual works about scalability from ethnography (Fortun 2009; Tsing 2012), Computer supported cooperative work (Ribes 2014), critical geography (Frickel & Kinchy 2015), and innovation policy studies (Pfotenhauer et al. 2021) among others. REFERENCES - Asif, Manan Ahmed. 2019. “Technologies of Power – From Area Studies to Data Sciences.” *Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures*, no. #5 Spectres of AI (November). https://spheres-journal.org/contribution/technologies-of-power-from-area-st… . - Birch, Kean, and D. T. Cochrane. 2021. “Big Tech: Four Emerging Forms of Digital Rentiership.” *Science as Culture*, May, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1932794. - Couldry, Nick, and Ulises Ali Mejias. 2021. “The Decolonial Turn in Data and Technology Research: What Is at Stake and Where Is It Heading?” *Information, Communication & Society*, November, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1986102. - Dourish, Paul, and Scott D. Mainwaring. 2012. “Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse.” In *Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing – UbiComp ’12*, 133–42. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2370216.2370238. - Fortun, Kim. 2009. “Scaling and Visualizing Multi-Sited Ethnography,” in M.-A. Falzon (ed.), *Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Social Research*, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 73–85. - Frickel, Scott, and Abby Kinchy. 2015. “Lost in space: Geographies of ignorance in science and technology studies.” In *Routledge international handbook of ignorance studies*, pp. 174-182. Routledge. - Malazita, James W. 2022. “Epistemic Infrastructures, the Instrumental Turn, and the Digital Humanities” *People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center*, Eds. Anne McGrail, Angel David Nieves, Siobhan Senier, University of Minnesota Press. - McPherson, Tara. 2012. “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In *Race after the Internet*, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, 21–37. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10535025. - Ochigame, Rodrigo. 2020. “Informatics of the oppressed.” *LOGIC *11: 53-74. https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/ - Pfotenhauer, Sebastian, Brice Laurent, Kyriaki Papageorgiou, and and Jack Stilgoe. 2021. “The politics of scaling.” *Social Studies of Science*: 03063127211048945. - Ribes, David. 2014. “Ethnography of scaling, or, how to fit a national research infrastructure in the room.” In *Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing*, pp. 158-170. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531624 - Srnicek, Nick. 2017. *Platform Capitalism*. John Wiley & Sons. - Stevens, Hallam. 2016. “Hadooping the Genome: The Impact of Big Data Tools on Biology.” *BioSocieties* 11 (3): 352–71. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-016-0003-6. - Takhteyev, Yuri. 2012. *Coding places: Software practice in a South American city*. MIT Press. - Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2012) “On nonscalability: The living world is not amenable to precision-nested scales.” *Common Knowledge* 18(3): 505–524. *Contact*: yoehan.oh(a)gmail.com *Keywords*: scalability, cloud computing, critical data studies, software studies, information infrastructure studies *Submission website*: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss22/ -- Yoehan Oh Ph.D. Candidate Department of Science and Technology Studies The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Rensselaer Polytechnic institute 110 Eighth Street Troy, NY 12180 United States https://hass.rpi.edu/sts-graduate-students https://info.rpi.edu/people/yoehan-oh e-mail: ohy(a)rpi.edu ; yoehan.oh(a)gmail.com phone: (518) 368-1257 pronoun: he/him

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Tips on 18th - 20th c. nautical and astronomical tables
by Bernard Geoghegan 04 Apr '22

04 Apr '22

Dear Colleagues, Can anyone recommend key works on 18th-20th c. astronomical, nautical, and maritime charts, esp as a pre-history to modern information processing? I’m trying to write a history of how 19th c. visuality was pieced together at sea, from a patchwork of observations, charts, tables, astrolabes, etc, in which a regime of calculations and information processing figure centrally in making visual sense of the surrounding world. To give a very general idea of where I’m coming from, I’ve found some very useful work in the Campbell-Kelly et al volume on “The History of Mathematical Tables,” and Mindell’s work on naval systems of artillery control has also been an inspiring point of reference. Thank for your thoughts on further sources! Warmly, Bernard

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