December 14, 2015 #new
Rebecca Slayton and I are putting together a special issue of the journal Information and Culture on Information Technology and the Environment. Here is the call for papers:
Information technology has long played an important role in structuring relationships between humans and their environment. In recent decades, digital information and communications technologies have been heralded as the key to cutting carbon emissions through “smart” electric power grids, improved supply chain management, and other cybernetic visions. Computerized models and sensors have shaped and transformed ways of representing and intervening in the natural world, from efforts to study and manage localized eco-systems, to global climate modeling and proposals for geoengineering. While many environmentalists view computing as a key to protecting the natural environment, others have underscored the environmental damage done through global practices of mining, production, and waste disposal in the computing industry. This special issue aims to deepen understanding of the historically contingent and changing ways that information technology mediates between social and natural worlds.
We invite submissions of papers that address the role of information and communications technologies in structuring human and social experience of the environment in any historical period, including the contemporary one. Information and communications technologies are broadly defined and may include non-digital and non-electronic systems. We are particularly interested in papers responding to the following questions:
Target dates
To propose a paper for inclusion in the special issue, please submit a short abstract (500 words or less) to rs849@cornell.edu by January 15, 2016. Full papers will be peer-reviewed by at least two external reviewers, and will be due for review by April 30, 2016. Authors may be invited to present their research at a workshop in the summer of 2016. Final papers that are accepted for publication will be due for copyediting by December 1, 2016.
November 09, 2015 #talk
On November 9, 2015 I presented a version of the Dirty Bits project to the Science and Technology Studies program at the University of Michigan.
October 06, 2015
I was pleased to be asked to present this year’s keynote address at the annual Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society workshop. The theme this year was on infrastructures and so was a perfect fit for my new project on the global environmental history of computing.
A brief description of keynote can be found at the most recent newsletter of the Charles Babbage Institute.
March 21, 2015 #conferences
I presented on “Bitcoin ‘Mining’ and the Materiality of Digital Goods” at the Association for Environmental History conference in Washington, D.C. This was part of a panel on Computing and the Environmental that included papers by Joy Rankin (Yale) and Rebecca Slayton (Cornell).
March 10, 2015 #notes
This project has received funding from the following sources:
Preliminary versions of this work have been presentated at
Many thanks to those who have funded, provided feedback on, or otherwise supported this project.
January 21, 2015 #talks
I am pleased and honored to have been invited to give the 2015 Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture in the History of Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. I will be speaking on my recent work on the environmental history of computing.
