Dear Colleagues,
About 4 months ago, I sent a message on CBI's launch of Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture with the publication of its first essay, and encouraged people to join the CBI list, many have, some are on it from before. If you are not/have not, we just published our 5th essay article (continuous publication) and you can find a link below. As we publish one essay about every 3.5 to 4 weeks, or about 12 to 14 a year, we are not sending notices to SIGCIS each time, but encourage you to sign up/subscribe (free of course), see below.
I, however, did want to send a reminder now with this fascinating and insightful new article by Ph.D. student in Communication Univ. of Colorado's Malinda Dietrich. Dietrich contextualizes the AT&T picturephone of a half century ago with special attention to business, cultural, and infrastructural change over time with video calls. It, like the essay published several weeks ago by CBI Senior Research Fellow Jim Cortada on IBM's century-plus of mobile work (terrific to see and read of the Motorola "Brick" the IBM sales force and field engineers used), are especially timely in tying history to our work worlds from home, and frequent Zoom meetings.
We encourage you to not only read
Interfaces, but to publish in it--to submit a manuscript (about 2,000 to 3,000 words) to our interdisciplinary short essay journal. Essay submissions must have some meaningful focus on IT's past (recent or distant). We especially encourage work from those in sociology, anthropology, communication, history, media studies, information studies/sciences, archives, curation, computer science, policy studies, economics, social informatics, geography, and other fields. Please contact myself (
yostx003@umn.edu) or Amanda Wick (
abwick@umn.edu),
Interfaces' co-editors, with an essay manuscript, questions, or just to bounce an idea off one of us.
Best, Jeff
"Injustice wears the same harsh face wherever it shows itself."-Ralph Ellison
Jeffrey R. Yost, Ph.D.
Director, Charles Babbage Institute
Research Professor, Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
222 21st Avenue South
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture from the Charles Babbage Institute
Malinda Dietrich, University of Colorado, Boulder
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More than half a century ago, Bell Laboratories, the research branch of AT&T, unveiled its “Picturephone”, an early iteration of today’s video calls. While technically it worked, it completed the job it was supposed to, its design, the cost of use and the lack of interest in the Picturephone kept it from taking off.
More so, it was doomed to fail because of whom AT&T thought it should be targeted to. This edition of Interfaces discusses the use of the Picturephone during the second half of the 20th century as both an historical artifact and an opportunity for us to speak through cultural relations to infrastructure.
Read more.
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With our symposium Just Code being only one month away, remember to sign up soon. Deadline to register is Monday, October 19.
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