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Planning for SHOT meeting in Singapore, June 26-29, 2016
by Andrew Russell 10 Nov '16

10 Nov '16

Colleagues - It was nice to see so many of you for the SHOT and SIGCIS meetings this past weekend in Albuquerque. From my point of view things went extraordinarily well, and I don’t have words to express how happy I am about the quality of scholarship and spirit of camaraderie that I felt throughout the weekend. I think we all owe Nathan Ensmenger a special thanks for such a fantastic keynote presentation on computing’s environmental history - throughout the day people were calling it powerful, moving, transformative, etc. Also on Sunday, we celebrated the achievements of our colleagues, including: - the ten young scholars who were awarded travel grants from MIT Press, the Computer History Museum, and the Mahoney Fund. - Rebecca Slayton, winner of the 2015 CHM Prize for her book Arguments that Count - David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerard Alberts, winners of the inaugural Mahoney Prize for their article “When Technology Became Language” - Sarah McLennan, winner of SHOT’s 2015 Robinson Prize for her paper “Computing and the Color Line,” presented in a session organized jointly by SIGCIS and EDITH, thanks to Marie Hicks and Ruth Cowan. The main purpose of this message is to reinforce and amplify my call on Sunday morning for proposals for SHOT in Singapore in June 2016. SHOT will issuing its call for papers very soon, with a deadline in late 2015. In anticipation, please be thinking about participating in one of the following ways: 1. Put forth an Open Panel Proposal for the main SHOT meeting. SHOT will place a special emphasis on “open panel” topics that SHOT will circulate widely as it publicizes the CFP. 2. Organize a Complete Panel Submission of 3 or 4 papers for the main SHOT meeting. Please feel free to use the list or to contact me (or anyone on the SIGCIS Exec) if you want to float ideas and/or find extra panelists. 3. Submit a paper or panel for the SIGCIS 2016 Workshop that will be held, as usual, at the end of the SHOT conference in Singapore on Sunday, June 26. We expect to issue the CFP for the SIGCIS Workshop well after the SHOT CFP is issued; watch this space in mid-November or early December for details. As you contemplate your participation in the Singapore meeting, please keep 2 additional things in mind: 1. This is a terrific opportunity to forge new bonds with colleagues working on computing and information-related history and STS topics in Asia and the Pacific. To that end, if you have contacts there who have not been active in SIGCIS or SHOT, please do encourage them to join the SIGCIS list and to reach out to me if they want to join or help organize a session. 2. If you are in North America or Europe, try not to be too put off by the expense of the trip - particularly if you are in the early stages of your career. SHOT and SIGCIS have been raising funds for this conference for some time, and the generosity of our communities has been nothing short of inspiring. Travel support will be available! In summary: SHOT and SIGCIS 2015 were fantastic; it’s now up to us to make SHOT and SIGCIS 2016 even better. Please get in touch with me (or the list) if you have questions, suggestions, etc. about making the most of our opportunities at the Singapore meeting! Cheers, Andy Russell SIGCIS Chair

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Clinton's Ada
by JD Fleming 10 Nov '16

10 Nov '16

The Washington Post has reported that Hillary Clinton's pre-election confidence was in part based on her campaign's use of a bespoke psephological algorithm, named after Ada Lovelace. Perhaps, as an episode in the history of information, this one writes itself. Nonetheless, I bet there are people on this list who have some interesting things to say about it, and if so, I for one would certainly like to hear. JD Fleming -- J ames Dougal Fleming Associate Professor Department of English Simon Fraser University 778-782-4713 Burnaby -- British Columbia -- Canada. Incipiamus.

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Mobile Technologies and Access to Knowledge: New Call for Chapter Proposals
by Subramanian, Ramesh Prof. 10 Nov '16

10 Nov '16

Hello all, Greetings from Ramesh Subramanian! I am a Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project (Yale Law School), and a professor of Information Systems at Quinnipiac University. The "Access to Knowledge Global Academy (A2KGA)" is one of the initiatives that Yale ISP is involved in. I am co-editing a book titled "Mobile Technologies and Access to Knowledge" for the A2KGA. I would like to invite you to submit a chapter proposal for this book. I am attaching the book proposal here, and I would be grateful if you could help by submitting a proposal, and passing this CFP to anyone you know who might be interested. I look forward to hearing from you! Thanks in advance, -Ramesh --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ramesh Subramanian, Ph.D. Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Computer Information Systems Quinnipiac University Hamden, CT 06518. Phone: 203-582-5276 Email:rameshs@quinnipiac.edu Web: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/about/directory/faculty-detail/?Dept=16&Person=23… & Fellow, Yale Law School - Information Society Project New Haven, CT 06511 Email: ramesh.subramanian(a)yale.edu Web: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/9841.htm

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Gawker removing history
by Jonathan Coopersmith 06 Nov '16

06 Nov '16

http://fortune.com/2016/11/05/gawker-settlement-email-inventor/ with all due respect, would Katie Hafner be appropriately described as a historian? Jonathan Coopersmith Professor Department of History Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843-4236 979.845.7151 979.862.4314 (fax) http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/author/42 : latest post is "Coal Comfort. Is Hillary Clinton being 'Al Gored'?" at *http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153818 <http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153818>* * FAXED. The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine* (Johns Hopkins University Press) is the co-recipient of the 2016 Business History Conference Hagley Prize for best book in business history.

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Kelly Gotlieb Obituary
by Brian Randell 04 Nov '16

04 Nov '16

Hi: >From the (Toronto) Globe and Mail: The father of Canadian computing U of T professor found new uses for computers, ranging from library systems to designing jet planes BILL ATKINSON Special to The Globe and Mail November 4, 2016 Computing pioneer Kelly Gotlieb was quintessentially Canadian in that he united high technical achievement with a low public profile. Leaders in the field of digital computation, however, have long regarded the University of Toronto professor emeritus, who died on Oct. 16 at the age of 95, as the father of Canadian computer science. In 1948, just a year after receiving his doctorate, Dr. Gotlieb helped establish the country's first computation centre, at the University of Toronto, and in 1952, he imported Canada's earliest digital computer, FERUT, to his new lab. This 800-pound thermionic-tube-filled monster was the second of its kind to be produced by the British firm Ferranti Electric Co. (FERUT is an acronym for 'FERranti U of T'). With FERUT up and running, Dr. Gotlieb collaborated with the University of Saskatchewan to process research data digitally. U of S sent metres of paper tape by Teletype to U of T over analog phone lines, encoding gigabytes of raw data. Dr. Gotlieb's computation centre fed this into FERUT, which in mere hours had analytical output, also on paper tape, that was then sent back to U of S. The process was lightning-fast compared with previous snail-mail turnaround times of up to four months. When the university established its Department of Computer Science in 1964 (for graduate students only), Dr. Gotlieb was appointed its first director. By that point, he had already distinguished himself in digital computation, calculating the dynamic stability of designs for the new Avro Arrow fighter plane and modelling the hydrological consequences of various configurations for the St. Lawrence Seaway then being mooted. Dr. Gotlieb's calculations so reassured the U.S. Congress that it reversed its initial opposition to the Seaway, for the first time opening the industrial and agricultural heartland of North America to global seaborne trade. <snip> Full story at http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20161104.OBGOTLIEB/BDAStory… Cheers Brian Randell -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html

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searching for networks built on top of specific undersea cables
by Lori Emerson 03 Nov '16

03 Nov '16

Dear all, I'm at a bit of an impasse in my research and I wonder if any of you might have tips or advice for me. What I'm trying to do is see whether I can restructure my book project so that it looks at the life of, say, one to three undersea cables and then looks at different networks that were built on top of these cables. Right now my focus is on Canada, just because that's where I've made the most progress in my research, and I've narrowed my search down to three cables: CANTAT-1, CANTAT-2, and TAT-6. My question for all of you is whether you have any tips about how I can find out other networks that existed on these lines? Is it a matter of delving into who owned the lines and then taking trips to their corporate archives? Or is there a more direct, less expensive solution? I gather Bell Canada has historical archives in Montreal, or at least they did several years ago, but I'm surprised to find there is no website or obvious contact information for Bell's archivist... My sincere thanks! Lori -- Lori Emerson Associate Professor | Director, Media Archaeology Lab Department of English and Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance University of Colorado at Boulder Hellems 101, 226 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0226 loriemerson.net | mediaarchaeologylab.com

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Gawker settlement re the history of email
by Marc Weber 03 Nov '16

03 Nov '16

John Vittal just sent a link to this article: http://lawnewz.com/celebrity/gawker-will-pay-hulk-hogan-over-31-million-in-… Apparently Gawker settled with Ayyadurai for $750K, with a stipulation that posts are deleted. Regards, Marc

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Strachey Lecture - The Once and Future Turing
by Brian Randell 03 Nov '16

03 Nov '16

Hi: Here a video of Alan Hodges’ recent lecture at Oxford University on Alan Turing: https://www.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/strachey-lecture-once-and-future-turing Cheers Brian Randell -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell(a)ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 FAX = +44 191 208 8232 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html

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2nd CfP: Computability in Europe 2017, June 12-16, 2017, Turku, Finland
by lidemol 03 Nov '16

03 Nov '16

Dear all, please find below the second call for papers for Computability in Europe 2017, to be held from June 12-16 2017 in Turku. The conference also welcomes very much historical contributions and so offers an opportunity to communicate historical insight to an interdisciplinary community of logicians, mathematicians and computer scientists. Please, note also that there are some grants for young female scholars in the framework of the "Women in Computability" programme, very best wishes, Liesbeth CALL FOR PAPERS: ================ CiE 2017: Unveiling Dynamics and Complexity Turku, Finland June 12-16, 2017 http://math.utu.fi/cie2017 IMPORTANT DATES: ================ Deadline for article submission: January 5, 2017 Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2017 Final versions due: March 13, 2017 Early registration before: May 8, 2017 CiE 2017 is the thirteenth conference organized by CiE (Computability in Europe), a European association of mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, philosophers, physicists and others interested in new developments in computability and their underlying significance for the real world. Previous meetings have taken place in Amsterdam (2005), Swansea (2006), Siena (2007), Athens (2008), Heidelberg (2009), Ponte Dalgada (2010), Sofia (2011), Cambridge (2012), Milan (2013), Budapest (2014), Bucharest (2015) and Paris (2016). THE PROGRAMME COMMITTEE cordially invites all researchers (European and non-European) to submit their papers in all areas related to computability for presentation at the conference and inclusion in the proceedings at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cie2017. Papers must be submitted in PDF format, using the LNCS style (available at ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/tex/latex/llncs/latex2e/llncs2e.zip) and should have a maximum of 10 pages, including references but excluding a possible appendix in which one can include proofs and other additional material. Papers that build bridges between different parts of the research community are particularly welcome. The CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS will be published by LNCS, Springer Verlag. ORGANIZED BY: ============= Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Turku Computer Science, Åbo Akademi University email: cie2017(a)utu.fi WOMEN IN COMPUTABILITY PROGRAM AND GRANTS: ========================================== We are happy to announce that the CiE Women in Computability program, coordinated by the Special Interest Group Women in Computability http://sat.mdx.ac.uk/cie-wp/index.php/cie-conference-series/cie-cs-women-in… offers four grants of up to 250 EUR for junior female researchers who want to participate in CiE 2017. Applications for this grant should be send to Liesbeth De Mol (liesbeth.demol(a)univ-lille3.fr) before 1 May 2017 and include a short cv (at most 2 pages) and contact information for an academic reference. Preference will be given to junior female researchers who are presenting a paper (including informal presentations) at CiE 2017. TUTORIAL SPEAKERS: ================== Denis R. Hirschfeldt (University of Chicago) Daniel M. Gusfield (University of California, Davis) INVITED SPEAKERS: ================= Scott Aaronson (University of Texas at Austin) Karen Lange (Wellesley College) Ludovic Patey (Université Paris Diderot) Nicole Schweikardt (Humboldt-Universit ät zu Berlin) Alexander Shen (Université de Montpellier) Moshe Vardi (Rice University) SPECIAL SESSIONS: ================= Algorithmics for biology: ------------------------- Organized by Paola Bonizzoni (Milano, Italy) and Veli Mäkinen (Helsinki, Finland). Speakers: Tobias Marschall (Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik) Fabio Vandin (University of Padova) Gregory Kucherov (University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée) Gianluca Della Vedova (University of Milano-Bicocca) Combinatorics and algorithmics on words: ---------------------------------------- Organized by Tero Harju (Turku, Finland) and Dirk Nowotka (Kiel, Germany). Speakers: Stepan Holub (Charles University in Prague) Pascal Ochem (Université de Montpellier) Svetlana Puzynina (Sobolev Institute of Mathematics and École Normale Supérieure de Lyon) Narad Rampersad (University of Winnipeg) Computability in analysis, algebra, and geometry: ------------------------------------------------- Organized by Julia Knight (Notre Dame, USA) and Andrey Morozov (Novosibirsk, Russia). Speakers: Saugata Basu (Purdue University) Margarita Korovina (University of Aarhus) Alexander Melnikov (University of California, Berkeley) Russell Miller (Queens College, City University of New York) Cryptography and information theory: ------------------------------------ Organized by Delaram Kahrobaei (New York, USA) and Helger Lipmaa (Tartu, Estonia). Speakers: Jean-Charles Faugère (Université Pierre et Marie Curie) Elham Kashefi (University of Edinburgh-Scotland, Université Pierre et Marie Curie) Aggelos Kiayias (University of Edinburgh) Ivan Visconti (Università degli Studi di Salerno) Formal languages and automata theory: ------------------------------------- Organized by Juhani Karhumäki (Turku, Finland) and Alexander Okhotin (St. Petersburg, Russia). Speakers: TBA History and philosophy of computing: ------------------------------------ Organized by Liesbeth De Mol (Lille, France) and Giuseppe Primiero (London, United Kingdom). Speakers: TBA Contributed papers will be selected from submissions received by the PROGRAM COMMITTEE consisting of: Andrew Arana (Urbana-Champaign, US) Arnold Beckmann (Swansea, UK) Paola Bonizzoni (Milan, IT) Olivier Bournez (Palaiseau, FR) Vasco Brattka (Munich, DE) Cristian S. Calude (Auckland, NZ) Ann Copestake (Cambridge, UK) Liesbeth De Mol (Lille, FR) Helena Durnová (Brno, CZ) Ekaterina Fokina (Vienna, AT) Tero Harju (Turku, FI) Emmanuel Jeandel (Nancy, FR) Emil Jeřábek (Prague, CZ) Natašha Jonoska (Tampa, US) Jarkko Kari (Turku, FI, co-chair) Viv Kendon (Durham, UK) Takayuki Kihara (Berkley, US) Florin Manea (Kiel, DE) Klaus Meer (Cottbus, DE) Russell Miller (New York City, US) Bernard Moret (Lausanne, CH) Rolf Niedermeier (Berlin, DE) Dag Normann (Oslo, NO) Dirk Nowotka (Kiel, DE) Isabel Oitavem (Lisbon, PT) Ion Petre (Turku, FI, co-chair) Kai Salomaa (Kingston, CA) Reed Solomon (Storrs, US) Mariya Soskova (Sofia, BG) Susan Stepney (York, UK) Peter Van Emde Boas (Amsterdam, NL) Philip Welch (Bristol, UK) Damien Woods (Pasadena, US) Association CiE: http://computability.org.uk CiE Conference Series: http://illc.uva.nl/CiE CiE 2017 on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CIE.Conference2017 CiE 2017 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/2017Cie CiE 2017 on Instagram: https://instagram.com/cie.2017

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FW: CFP/Techniques of the Corporation
by Thomas Haigh 03 Nov '16

03 Nov '16

Sounds like something that should have significant input from the SIGCIS community. History of technology and history of IT don’t explicitly make their list of “diverse fields” relevant to the intersection of STS and the history of the corporation, but maybe some of you can come up with proposals that make the relevance clear. Tom CALL FOR PAPERS “Techniques of the Corporation” 4-6 May 2017, University of Toronto Technoscience Research Unit Conference organization Justin Douglas Bretton Fosbrook Kira Lussier Michelle Murphy How do corporations know themselves and their world? Over the last 150 years, corporations, like universities and laboratories, have generated an abundance of knowledge-making techniques in the form of psychological tests, efficiency technologies, scenario planning, and logistical systems. As dominant forms of the last century, corporations are assembled with instruments, infrastructures, and interventions that arrange and rearrange the dynamics of capitalism. These techniques of the corporation have filtered into our daily lives, influencing everyday understandings of self, inequality, environment, and society. Techniques of the Corporation will assemble an interdisciplinary network of established and emerging scholars whose work contributes to the critical study of the techniques, epistemologies, and imaginaries of the 20th-century corporation. This conference aims to foster a timely conversation between Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches and the recent histories of capitalism. We treat the corporation in the same way that historians of science and STS scholars have approached science, colonialism, and militarism as generative sites for knowledge production, value-making, and technopolitics. The conference takes as its starting place North American corporations with the understanding that corporations are multinational forms with complex transnational histories. Building from the recent history of capitalism, we attend to the entangled genealogies of corporations with slavery, exploitation, environmental destruction, colonialism, and inequality. Hosted by the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto, this event will be an intimate multi-day conversation between established and emerging scholars in the fields of STS, history of science, and the history of capitalism. Techniques of the Corporation will be headlined by keynote speaker Joseph Dumit, and features invited talks by Dan Bouk, Elspeth Brown, Deborah Cowen, Orit Halpern, Louis Hyman, Michelle Murphy, Martha Poon, and Elise Thorburn. The conference will be an immersive experience in the Greater Toronto Area with meals and cocktails provided. We invite emerging and established scholars in diverse fields (including business history; labour history; anthropology; geography; economic sociology; media studies; critical race studies; architecture studies; feminist and sexuality studies; environmental studies; and cultural studies) to explore the techniques, epistemologies, and imaginaries of corporations. Our overall goal is to crystallize a new field, culminating in a field-defining publication. We welcome work on corporate practices that exceed calculative logics, such as work on social relations, affective and psychological states, and speculative futurities. In addition to traditional papers, the conference encourages creative methods to query corporate forms, including art installations, videos, interactive multimedia projects, and role-playing games. Applications for travel assistance will be arranged after acceptance. Corporate practices, include, but are not limited to: management sharing economy data management marketing risk management corporate culture planning corporate responsibility consulting infrastructure sustainability research and development logistics corporate design intellectual property gaming precarity affective labor racial surveillance architecture transnational capital Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words and a CV to the conference organizers at <mailto:corporatetechniques@gmail.com> corporatetechniques(a)gmail.com by 13 January 2017. -- Bretton Fosbrook • Doctoral Candidate Science & Technology Studies Faculty of Sciences YORK UNIVERSITY Bethune College • 4700 Keele Street Toronto ON • Canada M3J 1P3 T 416.736.2100 <mailto:bfosbro@yorku.ca> bfosbro(a)yorku.ca • <http://www.yorku.ca/> www.yorku.ca <https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aYnJldHRvbi5mb3Nicm9va0BnbWFpbC5jb2…> ᐧ <https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aYnJldHRvbi5mb3Nicm9va0BnbWFpbC5jb2…> ᐧ <https://mailfoogae.appspot.com/t?sender=aYnJldHRvbi5mb3Nicm9va0BnbWFpbC5jb2…> ᐧ

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