Hello everyone, I was just looking at the recently announced program for the Business History Conference meeting in St. Louis, 31 March-April 2. http://www.thebhc.org/annmeet/general11.html We’re organized panels for previous meetings, though not for this year’s. However there are still a few presentations by SIGCIS members scattered through the program. Computing and IT are not always as visible at the conference as we might hope, but it is an interesting conference with a diverse range of perspectives so perhaps we can organize something for the next meeting (Philadelphia, March 2012) when the announcement goes out later this year. Knowledge seems to be a hot topic there, so this might be a good frame. The papers that caught my eye are Jeffrey R. Yost, University of Minnesota Diebold and Associates, Information Technology Consulting, and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Digital Computers and Applications Programming in the 1950s Hyungsub Choi, Chemical Heritage Foundation Circulation of Knowledge in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions Olga Pantelidou, National Technical University of Athens The Citi Never Sleeps: ATMs and Corporate Social Policy in New York City during the 1970s Also an interesting panel on methodology featuring several SIGCIS members: E.1 Method or Madness: Does Business History Have a Methodology? Regency C Chair: R. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific Discussant: The Audience David Kirsch, University of Maryland Between the Humanities and Management Science: The Epistemology of Business History JoAnne Yates, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Historical and Qualitative Methods for Studying Organizations Matthias Kipping, York University, and H. Daniel Wadhwani, University of the Pacific The “Holy Trinity” of the Historical Method: Source Critique, Triangulation, and the Hermeneutic Circle Roy Suddaby, University of Alberta The Use of Historical Methods in Organizational and Institutional Theory Finally this year's president, Richard R. John, is well known as a historian of communications, treating the early US postal system as a kind of information infrastructure. His new book is a history of American Telecommunications, apparently dealing with AT&T and Western Union (didn't read it yet...). http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/profile/47-richard-r-john/10 Tom