[SIGCIS-Members] Chairs and commentators needed for SIGCIS 2010 workshop -- reply soon

Hello, We’re almost ready to put our 2010 workshop program up on the website. Thanks to all who submitted, and apologies to those we had to turn away. (Oct 3, held on the Sunday of the SHOT conference in Tacoma, Washington. See www.sigcis.org/workshop10.) Also thanks to Jeff Tang whose done most of the work so far. He’s on holiday with his family this week, so I’m putting out this call myself to minimize the amount of time he spends slumped over his laptop. We need volunteers for chairs and commentators. If we receive a surplus of interest we’ll prioritize offers from people not already presenting at the workshop. I’m summarizing our needs below – you can volunteer in general or for specific panels. We need a total of about six people. Here’s what we need you for: “Place and Space” (a traditional panel of individually submitted paper addressing the workshop theme of Materiality and Immateriality). We need a chair and a commentator. • The Material History of Digital Electronics: The Development of Silicon Manufacturing Technology at Fairchild Semiconductor (Brock & Lecuyer) • “The World Looks to Britain”: Technology Transfer, Heterogeneous Engineering, and British Computing Companies’ Attempt to Capture the Indian Market, 1955-1965 (Hicks) • Wat' Forever: Computing Education at the University of Waterloo (Campbell) • Materiality, modernity and space: The British banks and their computer centres, 1961–1963 (Martin) “Teaching & Showing” (a traditional panel of individually submitted paper addressing the workshop theme of Materiality and Immateriality). We need a chair and a commentator. • The PLATO Computer-Based Education System: Teacher's Tool or Teacher? (MacDonald) • Car Navigation Systems – A History of Associative Clusters (Thielmann) • A Material History of Bits (Blanchette) • Museums and the Material Culture of Video Games (Foti) Dissertations in progress session. This will be based on precirculated dissertation proposals with very brief introductions. We need a chair and a commentator. It’s possible that the roles could be combined, so that the job will be to give brief comments and then steer subsequent discussion to maximize its usefulness to the dissertators. • The Akademgorodok Computing Center (1958-1990) (Tatachenko, Princeton) • Digital Equipment's Rise and Fall, Could it Have Been Avoided? (Godwin, Birkbeck College London) • A History and Ethnography of the Cocoa Software Community (Hsu, Cornell) • Connecting Minds in a Multimedia Episteme: The Academic Supercomputer Centers and the Construction an Advanced Cognitive Infrastructure for the U.S. Research Community: 1983-1993 (Walsh, UCSD) Works in progress session, again with precirculated papers. • On-line distribution of working papers through NEP: A Brief Business History (Batiz-Lazo, University of Leicester) • Making Computers Logical: Edmund Berkeley’s promotion of logical machines (Sugimoto, Kyoto University) • Investing in interactive skills – a reinterpretation of the Swedish internet boom and bust, 1994–2004 (Sjöblom, Chalmers University of Technology ) • Meta Filter: Coming to Agreement with Interactive Computer Technology (Irish, UIUC) Let me know today or tomorrow if you are interested. (To further whet your appetite, in addition to the above we have Paul Edwards as keynote, and two roundtables on computers in science fiction and teaching the history of computing). Details on the main SHOT meeting are at http://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual_meeting.html. Tom