Greetings all - The deadline for paper and panel proposals for the Business History Conference is October 1. The meeting takes place in Portland, Oregon from March 31-April 2, 2016. The theme for the 2016 meeting is “Reinterpretation” - see http://thebhc.org/call-papers-2016 for details. It is sounding more and more like a timely theme, given recent discussions on this list. I’m writing to encourage you to submit proposals, and to make a few comments about BHC: - for those who haven’t been to BHC, you shouldn’t be too put off by the word “business” in the group’s title. Topics under discussion at BHC include the history of capitalism, political economy, regulation, organizations (including non-profit and public-private orgs), and (of course) technology. Also, one can attend BHC and be *anti*-business, if that suits your ideological preferences. - Several SIGCIS members regularly attend BHC; indeed, many of us consider BHC to be a second scholarly home. There are often more than one or two panels that deal explicitly with computing and/or information. Perhaps some of them/us will comment here about their experiences with BHC. I believe we have at least one former BHC President as a list subscriber… For what it’s worth, my own experiences there have been uniformly positive, and I’m looking forward to attending the meeting in Portland. - BHC has an excellent infrastructure for supporting young scholars, including travel grants, the Herman Krooss Prize for the best dissertation in business history, and the BHC Doctoral Colloquium in Business History - see http://www.thebhc.org/doctoral-colloquia for details of the latter. - This year's CFP notes that the 2016 meeting location on the west coast provides an opportunity for the community to “take a fresh look at what might be termed the communities of the Pacific.” For those planning to attend the SHOT/SIGCIS meetings in Singapore in June 2016, the BHC meeting in Portland looks like it could serve as a nice way to focus attention on things Pacific. Finally: I would be happy to facilitate a SIGCIS-themed submission (or submissions) for this year. If you have a paper idea or panel idea, and would like to find other scholars to join in, please let me know by September 15. Or, better yet, feel free to use the list to float your ideas and recruit others to join in. All the best, Andy Russell SIGCIS Chair --------------------------------------- Andrew L. Russell, Ph.D. Director, Program in Science & Technology Studies Associate Professor, History College of Arts & Letters Stevens Institute of Technology Hoboken, New Jersey 07030 t. 201-216-5400 || f. 201-216-8245 arussell@stevens.edu<mailto:arussell@stevens.edu> || @RussellProf www.stevens.edu/cal/sts<http://www.stevens.edu/cal/sts> || www.arussell.org<http://www.arussell.org> Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2014 || www.arussell.org/open<http://www.arussell.org/open>)