Hello everyone, The 2013 CFP for the annual meeting of our parent society, the Society for the History of Technology is now online. The meeting is 10-13 October, 2013 in Portland Maine, which for international travelers is fairly easy to get to as it is a 2.5 hour train ride from Boston or a short connecting flight from many US hub airports. This is NOT the Portland on the west coast. Meeting details at http://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual_meeting.html. Deadline March 31. I lived in Maine for two years, and from the viewpoint of Waterville in central Maine, Portland was a big bustling place with mild weather and fancy restaurants. For Bostonians it's a small quaint town in the exotic north with a blue collar tinge. Anyway, the weather will probably be quite nice in mid-October. SHOT is a friendly conference, open to newcomers. It's a good opportunity to meet people interest in the history of computing, but also to interact with the broader community of historians of technology. SHOT traditionally has some themes in its CFP, but I do not see any this time, just "any topic in the history of technology, broadly defined." 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. Below is the description I prepared last year for those interested in SHOT and in the service SIGCIS offers of trying to assemble ideas from people interested in presenting in the main conference and knitting the resulting abstracts into coherent, relevant panel proposals. Andrew Russell is now SIGCIS Chair Elect, and so I'll be working jointly with him to get the panels together this year. OPPORTUNITY TO PARTICIPATE IN SIGCIS SPONSORED PANELS: SIGCIS generally organizes two or 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. We also work to match people at different career stages, of different genders, and in different countries which the CFP says will boost chances of acceptance. 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 would like this by March 3, well ahead of SHOT's March 31 deadline, so that we have plenty of time to work on the panels. 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. For some years now SHOT has been calling for more diverse kinds of proposal, such as roundtables or interactive sessions. I've been told that not many are submitted, but the program committee is open to them. HOW SHOT PANELS WORK: Certain things are normal 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. (NB: this part seemed to offend a few people last year, but it's just making explicit the taken-for-granted cultural practices of history conferences for the benefit of those who haven't been to graduate school in the humanities. I'm not judging anyone. For example, in computer science full papers are reviewed, scores and comments are shared with authors, accepted papers are published in proceedings, and everyone is expected to use LaTEX rather than Word. At ASIS&T, the main information science conference, panels and reviewed papers are expected to feature quite different kinds of content and there's a taboo against assembling scholarly papers into a panel format. So if you ever venture outside history you will realize that our practices are not universal.) 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 remaining few minutes lost in setup, handover, and late return of the audience from the coffee break. Some panels are proposed as a whole. Others are assembled by the program committee from papers submitted individually. . Most people now use PowerPoint, at least for images. Some people use bullet points. Many historians still read papers word for word. . 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. At least I've never received any. 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 this has usually been waived in the year following an "overseas" meeting, and last year's meeting was in Copenhagen. I don't see anything in the 2013 call one way or another. . 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