Hello SIGCIS members,

The dance of the heavens and progress of the Earth have brought us once again to that special time of year: the SHOT annual meeting call. Well, technically the “pre-call,” as so far there’s been a limited announcement with a promise of details to follow “By 13 February 2012.” Below this message are pasted the current details from the SHOT website at http://www.historyoftechnology.org/shot2012cfp.html.

Note: this is NOT the call for the annual SIGCIS workshop, which usually takes place on the final Sunday of the conference. Our call will follow and will have a much later deadline.

SIGCIS generally organizes one to three panel proposals for the main SHOT conference, and individual members sometimes also use the email list to put together panel proposals with SIG sponsorship. These proposals are reviewed like any others by the SHOT program committee. Sponsorship doesn’t guarantee acceptance, but working with the SIG raises the chance of your paper being part of a coherent, relevant, and polished proposal.

If you are interested in being part of such a panel please send me an informal expression of interest with a brief description of your possible contribution. I then try to find common themes to develop in the topics that could tie them together into a coherent looking proposal, and work with the authors to refine the individual abstracts to meet the expectations of historians of technology.

SIGCIS members are also encouraged to develop their own panel proposals. These can also be sponsored by the SIG. Feel free to reply to the list (members@sigcis.org) to find additional panel members.

Certain things are common for history conferences but can confuse those from other disciplines. SHOT isn’t usually as explicit about some things in its call as it could be. What you need to know:

· Panels generally run for 90 minutes and consist of three panelists, a commentator, and a chair. Speakers get about 20 minutes each, with 10 for the commentator, 10-15 for questions, and the rest wasted. Most people now use PowerPoint. Many historians still read papers word for word. Some panels are proposed as a whole. Others are assembled by the program committee from papers submitted individually.

· Reviewing is based on a one page abstract and one page cv, and thus is obviously not double blind. Usually about 1/3 of submissions are rejected, but you will never know why as you do not receive comments from the reviewers. Selection is done by the program committee members themselves, with program balance and session coherence a concern. Therefore the odds of being accepted are generally higher as part of a coherent panel than as an individual paper.

· The full paper is never reviewed or published, but you are still expected to write out some version of it for the commentator to read prior to the meeting.  The commentator is supposed to weave together useful common threads in the papers, add context where missing, and make suggestions on possible improvements. This role is known as a “discussant” in some disciplines. SHOT commentators generally err on the side of niceness, particularly versus some discussion I’ve seen in business schools.

· All the chair does is to introduce the speakers, moderate the question period, and make sure that everything runs to time. It’s a good way to get yourself onto the program if you don’t have any new work to present.

· Only one paper submission per person per year is allowed.  SHOT discourages people from speaking two years running, but that rule does not apply this year because this is an “overseas” (i.e. not the USA) meeting.

· Connecting your paper or panel to an official conference theme is helpful, but not usually essential. The East/West Cold War theme should be an easy one for many of us to address.

· SHOT usually has travel money from the NSF and other sources to help graduate student presenters and those “between jobs.” This is applied for separately after acceptance of your paper.

Best wishes,

Tom Haigh

SHOT CALL FOR PAPERS, on SHOT WEBSITE AS OF FEB 16, 2012

Call For Papers:
SHOT 2012: 4-7 October
Copenhagen, Denmark

Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2012

The Society for the History of Technology will hold its annual meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark from 4-7 October at the Copenhagen Business School. The Program Committee invites paper and panel proposals on any topic in the history of technology, broadly defined. The Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or sessions, as well as works-in-progress from researchers at all levels (including graduate students, chaired professors, and independent scholars). It welcomes proposals from those new to SHOT, regardless of discipline. Multinational, international, and cross-institutional sessions are particularly encouraged. We especially encourage proposals from non-Western and Eastern-European scholars. Since this is a non-North American meeting, the Program Committee will permit scholars who presented at the 2011 Cleveland meeting to give papers in Copenhagen. It is SHOT's policy to relax its rule about not presenting papers at two consecutive meetings in order to attract as many people as possible to meetings outside of North America.

For the 2012 meeting the Program Committee continues to welcome unconventional sessions; that is, session formats that diverge in useful ways from the typical three/four papers with comment. These might include round-table sessions, workshop-style sessions with papers that are pre-circulated electronically, or "author meets critics" sessions. We also welcome poster proposals for presentation in poster sessions.

THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS 31 MARCH 2012.
DETAILED SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE AVAILABLE BY 13 FEBRUARY 2012.

SHOT 2012 SPECIAL THEMES
While paper and session proposals on all topics are welcome, the Program Committee is especially interested in proposals that engage the following themes:
I. Technology, sustainability, and environment. SHOT has a long history of analyzing how technologies have interfered with or shaped nature and our social or cultural environments. The search for sustainable technology solutions has recently become a main preoccupation of engineers, designers and tinkerers all over the world and is high on the political agenda too. Possible themes to address are:

· Questions of scale: onsite, small- and community-scale technology as challenges for large-scale and centralized models of technology design, both in rural and new urban environments

· Smart design: ecodesign and sustainable industrial or product design as evidence of smart solutions for an accountable handling of technology

· Natural infrastructures: infrastructures as “natural” environments and nature (air, water, soil) as co-producers of large-scale infrastructures

· More with less: new technologies and the search for efficiency in energy consumption or technologies of power saving in housing, transport, and communication

II. Technology, East-West relations, and the Cold War. During the Cold War, Europe was one of the central laboratories for experimentation with ideological and political regimes, which deeply affected traditional paths of knowledge and technology transfer in Europe. While the history of the Cold War has mainly been told as a history of discontinuity and fragmentation, we would especially welcome papers and sections dealing with examples of successful co-operation or “hidden continuities” in inter-European technology transfer during the 20th century. General areas to be explored are:

· Changing times: continuities and discontinuities in the transfers of knowledge and technology between Eastern and Western Europe and the rest of the world from the mid-19th century to the present

· Negotiating identities: spaces and places of co-operation or confrontation before, during, and after the Cold War

· Blurred boundaries: spill-over effects and holes in the Iron Curtain

· Trading zone: Europe as symbolic battlefield and diplomatic playground for world hegemony

· Chilling effects: Technologies at war & wartime technology

· Secret stories: technologies of intelligence and espionage and their staging in popular media (comics, films, magazines, television & radio)

· Competing Modernities: the uses of technology in a variety of economic development and modernization schemes

Evaluation Criteria
The Program Committee's highest priority in evaluating paper and panel proposals is scholarly excellence.

General ground rules
SHOT rules exclude multiple submissions (i.e., submitting more than one individual paper proposal, or proposing both an individual paper and a paper as part of a session).  However, scholars may both propose a paper and serve as a commentator or session chair.

Proposals for individual papers must include
1. a one-page abstract (maximum 600 words)
2. a one-page curriculum vitae, including current postal and e-mail addresses

Proposals for complete sessions must include
1. a description of the session that explains how individual papers contribute to an overall theme (300 words max)
2. the names and paper titles of the presenters
3. for each presenter, a one-page summary (maximum 600 words) of the paper’s topic, argument(s), and evidence used
4. for the commentator, chair, and each presenter: one-page c.v., with postal and e-mail addresses

* Please note that in general we discourage panels with more than three papers.
**Please indicate if a proposal is sponsored by one of SHOT’s special interest groups.

DETAILED SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE AVAILABLE BY 13 FEBRUARY 2012

For more information please see the Society's Annual Meeting Webpage. For general questions about the Society, please email SHOT Secretary Bernie Carlson.