STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

*Old Ideas:*
*Recomputing the History of Information Technology*

*SIGCIS Workshop 2013*
October 13, 2013, Portland, Maine

Deadline: June 30, 2013

http://www.sigcis.org/workshop13

The Society for the History of Technology's Special Interest Group for
welcomes submissions for a one-day scholarly workshop to be held on Sunday, October 13, 2013 in Portland, Maine. As in previous years, SIGCIS's annual workshop will occur immediately after the end of the regular SHOT annual meeting program, the details of which are available from
http://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual_meeting.html.

*Workshop Theme*

Information technologists have little time for old thinking, or for
anything else old. Entrepreneurs seek the new new thing, computer
scientists tackle the grand challenges of future computing, and management consultants chase the next fad. Scholars in the humanities, who are professionally skeptical about the nostrums of neoliberalism, the myth of progress, and the allure of the technological fix, can nevertheless exhibit a similar weakness for the shiny allure of new technologies. In short, information technology is rarely understood as something rooted in history.
Its cultural associations are with the future, not the past.
For the SIGCIS 2013 Workshop, we invite scholars to turn their attention to something different: old ideas and their relationship to information and computer technology. Perhaps to their overlooked charm, their enduring power, and their continuities with the putatively new.

More details and online submission forms at:
http://www.sigcis.org/workshop13 Questions about the workshop should be addressed to Thomas Haigh (School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee), who is serving as chair of the workshop program committee. Email thaigh@computer.org.