SIGCIS Workshop 2015: Infrastructures
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2015
The Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (
SIGCIS) welcomes submissions for our annual one-day scholarly workshop to be held on Sunday, October 11, 2015 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This is immediately after the end of the regular annual meeting of our parent organization, the Society for the History of Technology, details of which are available from
http://www.historyoftechnology.org/features/annual_meeting/.
Questions about the SIGCIS 2015 workshop should be addressed to Andrew Russell (Stevens Institute of Technology), who is serving as chair of the workshop organizing committee (e-mail:
arussell@stevens.edu).
Workshop Theme: Infrastructures
Across academic, artistic, and popular domains, curiosity and concern over the information and computing infrastructures that sustain economic, cultural, and social interaction has never been more salient. In contrast to the
hype generated by the gadgetry of innovation prophets and venture capitalists, an emphasis on infrastructure highlights networks of labor and focuses on the human, material, and ecological cost and scale of information and computing technologies.
For the SIGCIS 2015 Workshop, we invite papers that engage historical dimensions of the prosaic work of building networks, cultivating workforces, and maintaining computing and information infrastructures. Related themes necessarily include maintenance,
labor, and ordinary experiences with information and computing technologies. Proposals for individual papers or complete sessions might include the following topics:
- the maintenance of legacy hardware and software
- the training and treatment of labor and workforces
- the lived realities of computers and IT
- digital archives and their sustainability
- cyberinfrastructures for bureaucratic and scientific collaboration
- materiality of computing, media, and information technologies
- specific infrastructural technologies such as cables, fiber-optics, switching, and wireless
- political and economic aspects of infrastructure maintenance and development
- tensions between local or national legal regimes and global information infrastructures
As always, SIGCIS welcomes all types of contributions related to the history of computing and information, whether or not there is an explicit connection with the annual theme. Our membership is international and interdisciplinary, and our members
examine the history of information technologies and their place within society from a variety of scholarly perspectives including the history of technology, labor history, social history, business history, the history of science, science & technologies studies,
communications, media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and museum studies.
Suggested Formats for Submissions
Proposals for entire sessions and individual presenters are both welcome. We hope to run special sessions featuring dissertations in progress and other works in progress. The workshop is a great opportunity to get helpful feedback on your projects
in a relaxed and supportive environment. All proposals will be subject to a peer review process based on abstracts. As we attract submissions from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, it is best to be explicit: SIGCIS follows traditional practices for the
submission of papers for professional historical conferences. These include selection based on abstracts rather than full papers; no dissemination of full papers (with the exception of works in progress and dissertations in progress, as noted in the CFP);
and the requirement that presenters share their full papers with the session commentators at least 2 weeks prior to the meeting.
The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2015; the program committee will send notifications no later than July 15, 2015.
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