Dear SIGCIS,
Last weekend at the Business History Conference, an odd tweet
came off the SHOT-SIGCIS handle: #bhc2016 Speaker from @datasociety loves history of comp. literature, but
sees nothing in it to explain big data or social networking today.
What gives computer historians? If someone actually said something so silly at a conference, would it really be worth tweeting?! And why direct the message @ the speaker’s employer??
Let me take this opportunity to
introduce myself to the list: My name is Martha Poon. In my research, I track
how changes in economic thinking, documented by Philip Mirowski in his book Machine Dreams (2002), have been implemented,
through networked information systems, in financial markets. I’m trying to draw
a link between networked computing and today’s debt-driven capital markets.
My key piece of empirical work showed how automation of mortgage underwriting in the 1990s allowed the shadow banking sector to fund US subprime loans: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368209000270
But I published my very first article in an edited volume through SIGCIS (Technological Innovation in Retail Finance, 2010) when Bernardo Batiz-Lazo kindly invited me to participate in this working group: http://www.sigcis.org/node/9
At the BHC in Portland, someone asked why I hadn't mentioned the history of computing. In the context of my paper on 19th Century life insurance markets (Big Data and the Growing Power of Corporate Capitalism, I’ll attach it), on a panel that paid tribute to The Age of Fracture (2012), I quickly replied that computer history and Internet studies were not [as] well equipped [as business historians] to tackle the question of financial value. I would have welcomed the opportunity to converse further with SICGIS members, but nobody from the organization spoke to me after the session. Just this Dadaist tweet addressed to Data & Society’s communication’s team back in New York…!
I’m looking forward to attending SHOT and meeting the network properly. In the meantime, should list-members run into me elsewhere in the world, please, come talk to me! I juggle a number of disciplinary interests but I have long been a great admirer of computer history. Those of you in the New York area will find me here, next week, at Laine Nooney’s Mistakes Were Made: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mistakes-were-made-20-computer-history-decompiled-tickets-23017718616
With warm wishes,
Martha