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Materialities of the Digital ~ open panel at 4S
by Amy Johnson 18 Feb '15

18 Feb '15

Hi all, A colleague and I are running an open panel at this year's annual 4S meeting, called Materialities of the Digital. I've included the abstract and submission info below. If you know of anyone who might be interested, could you pass it on? Or if YOU'RE interested, send something our way. (Submission info here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting; deadline is March 29, 2015.) Really excited about this year's 4S theme of making and doing. Lots of interesting open panels. You can check them out here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/open_sessions. Thanks, ~Amy Materialities of the Digital Much popular discourse positions digital technologies as either phantom or prosthetic—presence without substance, or extension that enables new experience of the world. Think: Twitter and Google Glass. This phantom/prosthetic dichotomy is a curious one, one that demands scrutiny and challenge. What are the materialities of the digital? And what do we embrace—and hide—when we position them so? We investigate materiality broadly here. We include hardware and network materialities such as data centers and undersea cables, transistors and LCD crystals. Such materialities are often transmuted by metaphor: the cloud, the highway, the screen. Why are these materialities treated as elusive? What details are visible without this obscuring/illumination? We include classic bodily materialities—bodies themselves, but also physical extension through tactile interfaces and digital sex toys like RealTouch. What are the material practices of the digital? How do the shapes of bodies—and selves?—change as digital technologies transform boundaries and surroundings? As bodies/objects cross from one material channel to another? And we include relative materialities, such as language and script, bits and pixels, avatars and alts. Materialities that arise from their use as building blocks and tools, from their use as faces and agents that speak and remember. Components that undergird everything from affective emoji play to bots that shop the darknet. What does it mean to understand materiality as relative and relational? For this panel we invite papers drawing on diverse methodologies, from media studies and digital anthropology to feminist and queer theory, biomedicine, crip theory and disability studies, critical race studies, and neuroscience and neuroeconomics. Open session list here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting/open_sessions Submissions info here: http://www.4sonline.org/meeting (deadline: March 29, 2015) --- Amy Johnson PhD candidate<http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/johnson.html>, MIT HASTS Berkman Center for Internet & Society<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/ajohnson>, Harvard Keio International Project for Internet & Society<http://kipis.sfc.keio.ac.jp/people/amy-johnson/>, Keio University @shrapnelofme<https://twitter.com/shrapnelofme>

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Understanding Code Forking in Open Source Software
by Brian Randell 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

Hi: I’ve just been sent details of a PhD dissertation by Linus Nyman, "Understanding Code Forking in Open Source Software”, that I think will interest a number of SIGCIS members (across the historian of science - computer scientist spectrum), and which I don’t recall being discussed here before. The abstract: > Open source software is everywhere. From phones, tablets, TVs, and game consoles to less self-evident examples like cars, washing machines, and the International Space Station. However, what makes open source software remarkable is not where it can be found, but rather what can be done with it. One of the most astounding rights guaranteed by all open source software licenses is the right to fork the source code. In other words, the right to copy any program, either in part or in its entirety, and use that program to create a new, modified version of it. > > The right to fork has an enormous impact on both the development and governance of open source software. Despite its significance, code forking has seen little academic study. This dissertation examines the right to fork, its impact and significance, and how it is viewed and practiced by developers. > > The study draws on data consisting of hundreds of forks, interviews with open source software programmers, and an in-depth analysis of the birth of the MariaDB fork. This dissertation is relevant to anyone seeking a greater general understanding of how open source works and why it is considered a superior software development model. It may also serve as a useful resource for firms seeking to harness the power of open source software. Furthermore, it offers important insights to those who want to better understand how code forking is practiced and viewed by developers. > > This study finds that forks are primarily started for non-competitive reasons, with unique features or goals that distinguish them from their parent projects. Competitive forks are rare but do exist, with some motivating factors being to ensure the freedom of the code and the community’s ability to contribute to it. Furthermore, though developers may not always agree with the forking of a project, they nonetheless consider the right to fork to be of vital importance, and a cornerstone of free and open source software. > > In many ways, open source can be thought of as a return to how software was developed before the emergence of proprietary licensing. The same freedoms of development and sharing that thrived back then can be found today in the open source community. Indeed, in many ways the right to fork is synonymous with freedom: the freedom to explore and experiment, the freedom to benefit from the work done by others, and the freedom to keep any project relevant and vibrant even when faced with leadership decisions that are deemed unsupportable. In short, the right to fork is open source software’s guardian of freedom and watchdog of meritocracy. Full text available at: https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/153135 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.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell

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NSA putting spyware on the world's hard disk drives...
by Dag Spicer 17 Feb '15

17 Feb '15

Does this Leviathan know no bounds? Chilling news... http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/16/us-usa-cyberspying-idUSKBN0LK1QV2… Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055 Twitter: @ComputerHistory

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Reading lost data
by Christine Finn 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

Hello, Good to see this is being discussed. It's a bit ancient in itself, but I talked about excavating hard drives, and the issue of how to read old data, in a chapter in Artifacts: an archaeologist's year in Silicon Valley (MIT Press 2001). There's a related paper, which I gave with Sellam Ismail at a computer and tech conf in Vienna that year: 'The Valley of Lost Data: Excavating Hard Drives and Floppy Discs'. It should be archived in proceedings online http://www.vintage.org/content.php?id=004 The issue of lost data has preoccupied computer collectors for a long while. and I celebrate their forward-thinking in a chapter on Silicon Valley in the Oxford Handbook to the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (OUP, 2013) eds Harrison, Graves-Brown, Piccini. I also talk about it in a 4-episode BBC Radio 3 doc series, "It"s Big and it's Beautiful" about the rise of retro tech. It should be out there somewhere - on bit torrent? And the issue of lost manuscripts, especially with regard to writing future biographies, in a programme on BBC Radio 4, "Tales from the Digital Archive" http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010m9sw all best, Christine

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Coleman Prize
by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo 16 Feb '15

16 Feb '15

Aplogies if you have already received this but will appreciate if you circulate DEADLINE APPROACHING: If anyone knows of a recently completed PhD in Business History (broadly defined) from a British institution or on a British topic, please pass along this call for the Coleman Doctoral Prize in Business History. The deadline is 20 February, it is a great opportunity, not to be missed! http://www.abh-net.org/docs/conf/Call%20for%20Papers%20Coleman%20Prize%2020… -- ================== Twitter @BatizLazo Technological Innovation in Retail Finance: International Historical Perspectives Edited by Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, J. Carles Maixé-Altés, Paul Thomes http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/books/details/9780415880671 Home page: http://www.bangor.ac.uk/business/staff/bernardo_batiz-lazo.en.php Working papers: http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba14.html

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Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk
by Brian Randell 13 Feb '15

13 Feb '15

Hi: >From The Guardian: > Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Serf > > Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned. > > Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warning that we faced a “forgotten generation, or even a forgotten century” through what he called “bit rot”, where old computer files become useless junk. > > Humanity’s first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians because the electronic files that describe the story will not run on their computers. > > Cerf pushed for the development of “digital vellum” to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files could be recovered no matter how old they are. > > “When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people’s tweets, and all of the world wide web, it’s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,” he said. > > “We don’t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,” he added. <snip> Full story at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgott… 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.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk
by Brian Randell 13 Feb '15

13 Feb '15

Hi Scott: The Guardian was for year famous for its typos: > The Grauniad is a nickname for the UK national newpaper, the Guardian, because of a now ill-founded reputation for typos. The name was given to it by the satirical magazine Private Eye. The Guardian newspaper earned its reputation for lots of misprints in the days of hot-metal printing when it was published in Manchester (it was originally called the Manchester Guardian), and the editions that appeared in London were very early editions brought down by train, before all the errors had been spotted. Cheers Brian On 13 Feb 2015, at 13:35, Scott Guthery <sbg(a)acw.com> wrote: >>>> Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Serf > > I wonder if he's any relation of Vint Cerf. Maybe it's the British spelling. There are lots of other possibilities all of which have already flashed through your head so there is no need to list them. > > Cheers, Scott > -- 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.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell

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CHM 2015 CORE magazine out now!
by Dag Spicer 11 Feb '15

11 Feb '15

Dear friends, CHM is happy to announce that the 2015 issue of CORE magazine—the Museum’s annual publication—is out today. This year’s focus is “Moore’s Law,” in recognition of the 50th anniversary of that law this year. You can pick up your PDF copy here: http://www.computerhistory.org/core/media/pdf/core-2015.pdf Enjoy! Dag -- Dag Spicer Senior Curator Computer History Museum Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard Mountain View, CA 94043-1311 Tel: +1 650 810 1035 Fax: +1 650 810 1055 Twitter: @ComputerHistory

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Mahoney Prize - new article prize for 2015
by Andrew Russell 11 Feb '15

11 Feb '15

Greetings all - SIGCIS is happy to announce the inaugural call for submissions for the Mahoney Prize, a new article prize in the history of computing and information technology, broadly conceived. The following call for submissions is posted on our website at http://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize. Please share this announcement widely! The information below is also available from the SIGCIS website at http://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize, where you can find a pdf file of the prize announcement at the bottom of the page. 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 inaugural 2015 prize, articles published in the preceding three years (2012, 2013, and 2014) 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. The deadline for submission (electronic submissions preferred) to all three Prize Committee members is April 15, 2015. For more information, please contact the 2015 Mahoney Prize Committee Chair Prof. Jennifer Light, jslight(a)mit.edu <mailto:jslight@mit.edu>. 2015 Mahoney Prize Committee: Ross Bassett (term ends 2015) Associate Professor of History Director, Benjamin Franklin Scholars Department of History Box 8108 North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695 ross(a)ncsu.edu <mailto:ross@ncsu.edu> Jennifer S. Light, Chair (term ends 2016) Professor of Science, Technology, and Society Professor of Urban Studies and Planning Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave., E51-173 Cambridge, MA 02139 jslight(a)mit.edu <mailto:jslight@mit.edu> James Cortada (term ends 2017) Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota 2917 Irvington Way Madison, Wisconsin 53713 jcortada(a)umn.edu <mailto:jcortada@umn.edu>

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Query: Legal history of the internet / Internet in Germany
by Janet Abbate 10 Feb '15

10 Feb '15

I'm forwarding a query about the history of Internet law and regulation. Most of what I'm familiar with is about standards, ICANN and IANA, and global governance issues; I sent him some references for Mueller and DeNardis. I don't know anything about the Internet in Germany. Suggestions? You can respond directly to Peukert, or to this list and I will collect and forward. thanks, Janet Begin forwarded message: > From: "Peukert, Alexander" <a.peukert(a)jur.uni-frankfurt.de> > Date: February 9, 2015 8:26:56 AM EST > To: "abbate(a)vt.edu" <abbate(a)vt.edu> > Subject: Legal history of the internet? > > Dear Professor Abbate, > > I am teaching IP law at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main/Germany, and I read with great interest your book “Inventing the Internet”. I am currently undertaking a search with regard to the legal history of the internet, that is to say the regulations that governed the evolution of the internet in the U.S. and other countries, in particular Germany. Aside of your book, I only came across few articles that partly address some issues, in particular the history of ICANN (Weinberg, 2000) and the privatization of the internet backbone network (Kesan and Shah, 2001). I did not find, however, an in-depth legal-historical study of one (let alone all) major steps in the evolution of the internet until the end of the 1990ies. > > Are you aware of such a study? Do you know someone who is dealing with these questions? > > Kind regards > Alexander Peukert > ________________________________________________________ > Prof. Dr. Alexander Peukert > Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main - Exzellenzcluster Normative Ordnungen > Grüneburgplatz 1, Hauspostfach EXC-12, D-60323 Frankfurt am Main > Tel: + 49 (0) 69 798 31477; Fax: + 49 (0) 69 798 31462 > http://www.jura.uni-frankfurt.de/peukert/ und http://ssrn.com/author=1244916 > >

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