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).
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.
