I hope this message finds everyone well. David Theodore and I are proposing an open session on health and computation for SHOT 2021 and would be delighted to receive abstracts from members of the SIGCIS community. We include the call below for your consideration. Please feel free to write to us with any questions and of course to forward the call to any other potentially interested colleagues.

HEALTH AND COMPUTATION BEFORE THE INTERNET

David Theodore, Associate Professor, McGill University; Canada Research Chair in Architecture, Health, and Computation

Theodora Vardouli, Assistant Professor, McGill University

It’s not just “Dr. Google.” Networked information technologies have transformed healthcare in ways so profound that an internet outage in a hospital suffices to wreak havoc and make newspaper headlines. And yet the conception of hospitals as information processing infrastructures precedes the advent of the world wide web or the digitization of various medical processes. This session invites contributions that consider the ways in which hospitals, both as buildings and as institutions, accommodated computation and information processing before computer terminals became a standard feature of every room. We are interested in a wide range of historical work, from micro-histories to wide-lens accounts, shedding light on the transition of hospitals from buildings for practicing care to informationally mediated environments. We are also interested in papers that consider the ways in which hospitals’ physical infrastructure served as a testing ground for the conception and implementation of new information systems and computational ideas that eventually transcended healthcare. Papers that engage issues of class, race, gender, and body ability are particularly welcome. Topics include but are not limited to histories of scientific management and other informational abstractions of hospital labor; automation of healthcare and medical procedures; computational models in hospital design and management; hospitals as networks and data architectures; introduction of computers and digital equipment in hospital spaces; inclusion and exclusion of bodies in the conception and development of information infrastructures; hospitals, computer rhetoric, and digital culture.

Those interested to be considered for inclusion in the session should contact the organizers at david.theodore@mcgill.ca and theodora.vardouli@mcgill.ca by April 7 with a presentation title, a one-page abstract (maximum 500 words) and a one-page short CV with current contact information (maximum 300 words each).

Theodora Vardouli

Assistant Professor | Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture | McGill University

815 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal Québec, Canada H3A 0C2 | 514.398.6709

@McGill | openarchitectures.com

Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground