2013 Fall Conferences & Talks
November 05, 2013
#media
It has been a busy month of conferences and speaking engagements. The Commission for the History and Philosophy of Computing hosted the second in a series of HAPOC conferences in Paris this year. This was an extraordinarily full and productive conference, with speakers and participants from all over Europe, the UK, and the United States. My contribution was a talk on “the multiple meanings of flowcharts.” The Society for the History of Technology conference in Portland, Maine, featured many papers in computing related issues. The Special Interest Group on Computing and Information Science (SIGCIS) hosted a day of talks devoted entirely to the history of computing. My SHOT talk was devoted to exploring what I am calling “the environmental history of computing.” Finally, I attended for the first time the annual conference of the Association for Internet Researchers in Denver, Colorado. Our panel was organized around the idea of revisiting some of the canonical works in our respective disciplines (history, anthropology, communications) in light of changes in information technology. I spoke about the classic Latour/Woolgar ethnography of science Laboratory Life and asked, in reference to the study of contemporary, computer-centric scientific practices, What Would Bruno Do?.