And after that thoughtful and engaging panel, #SIGCIS2024 (& #SHOT2024) has officially reached its conclusion!
Thank you to all the presenters, organizers & institutional partners who made this meeting so successful. Hope to see many of you next year in Luxembourg! #histSTM #histtech #STS
Bergmann shows how the Screen Checker reflected TCO’s collectivist goals. It was meant to educate workers & empower them to understand their work env.
TCO sought to inform people of their rights as computer workers. Additionally, its was made of low-cost materials & easy to distribute. #SIGCIS2024
Bergmann describes the components of the Screen Checker, a tool developed by the Swedish labor organization TCO. The checker included a questionnaire, plastic template to measure the properties of a screen/keyboard, and a check list that could be sent to equipment manufacturers.
#SIGCIS2024
“It has rays from the screen.”
Our final speaker, Rachel Bergmann, examines debates over the potential harms associated w/CRT-based video terminals to explore the relationship between labor, ergonomics, and environmentalism in histories of computing. #SIGCIS2024
Wen concludes by describing future research plans. She intends to look at the management of dynamically monitored microclimates in manufacturing facilities, computer centers, etc. #SIGCIS2024
Wen links thermal engineering in the electronics industry w/previous investigations of thermal comfort in industrial settings that were launched in the 1920s by the American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers (ASHVE).
#SIGCIS2024
Wen quotes Finn Bruton (“The work of computation is also the work of managing heat.”) before outline research ?s related to thermal engineering.
Broadly speaking, she wants to know about how thermal technologies & thermal engineering reshaped electronics tech & manufacturing. #SIGCIS2024
Our next speaker, Jiaqi Wen, begins her talk w/a description of a 2022 labor action, when 1000s of workers fled the Foxconn iPhone plant in Henan Province. (See below)
She is interested in the engineering of air, body & env. in the electronics industry. #SIGCIS2024
labourreview.org/foxconns-gre...
Toland calls attention tot he Hira Project, which will hopefully facilitate the creation of an app/website where people can review & update their health info.
Despite its promise, it remains to be seen whether it will survive the new government’s budget cuts. #SIGCIS2024
Toland: Environmental factors & wide variety of stakeholders, along w/NZ’s short political cycle (3 years), have made it tough to implement nation-wide changes to health info systems. Changing privacy guidelines & a flurry of cybersecurity breaches have further complicated these efforts. #SIGCIS2024
Toland: “Every change that has happened since 1984, the story is ‘This is to minimize bureaucracy.’”
Despite its small population, NZ’s health info systems are not well coordinated. Privacy is often (incorrectly) blamed, but it’s really a matter of standardization (or its absence)….
#SIGCIS2024
After providing an overview of New Zealand’s health system from 1938 to the present, Toland calls attention to the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), which guarantees Māori control over their own resources.
There are also separate agencies overseeing accident compensation & pharmaceuticals. #SIGCIS2024
Toland: Why study health info systems?
A: Lots of reasons, including: 1) Political importance; 2) Wide range of stakeholders involved; 3) institutional issues that complicate collaboration; 4) Sociotechnical system that is reliant on both interoperability & privacy. #SIGCIS2024
OK, everyone—it’s time for the final panel session of #SIGCIS2024 and, by extension, #SHOT2024.
I’m staying in D-207 for three presentations on labor in (& beyond) Silicon Valley. Our first speaker is Janet Toland, who is discussing efforts to patch health information systems in New Zealand.
In response to an audience question Fetterolf calls attention to similar headlines (& anxiety) surrounding the Voder & ChatGPT.
Fetterolf suggests that this parallel may reflect shared anxiety about the automation—and potential obsolescence—of human labor. #SIGCIS2024
Wallner: VKP-2 didn’t close the computing gap, but it demonstrated that USSR could engage w/Western researchers studying AI, graph theory, software languages.
Women were prominently featured @ VKP-2 (30% of attendees). Not lots of speakers but more representation there than in US/ACM. #SIGCIS2024
Wallner provides an overview—and a nice infographic—comparing the various “waves” of computing in the West and USSR. (Note the prominence of IBM 360 and the Soviet Unified Computer Project. More on the latter: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/356725.356728 #SIGCIS2024
Wallner’s major research questions:
1) What does VKP-2 reveal about USSR’s attempt to catch up with advances in western computing?
2) How exactly did USSR computer sci fall “behind”? (Lack of demand or supply?)
3) How did VKP-2 programmers mitigate structural issues in USSR? #SIGCIS2024
The final speaker in this session, Danielle Wallner, takes us to the other side of the Iron Curtain w/a microhistorical discussion of the Second Annual All-Union Conference in Programming (VKP-2), held in 1970 in Novosibirsk.
#SIGCIS2024
Lepp: ChatGPT has formalized, rather than disrupted, the infrastructures associated with the computer science community.
If ChatGPT is a tool that is expected to be used by people whose 1st language isn’t English, then they’re the ones who will bear the burden of the tech’s evolution. #SIGCIS2024
Lepp traces the origins of ICLR back to a 2013 blog post by Yann LeCun that discussed an open review process.
Based on 80,000 ICLR open reviews, she has identified quantitative evidence of penalties for scholars outside N. America and Eur. Post-2023 (& ChatGPT), this begins to change… #SIGCIS2024
Lepp: The introduction of ChatGPT and other automatic translation models may provide new ways for computer sci. researchers to enter peer-reviewed, published spaces.
To get a sense of these dynamics, she analyzed the publication practices of ICLR (International Conf. Of Learning Reps.) #SIGCIS2024
Our next speaker, Haley Lepp, begins by asking us to think critically about the politics of presenting papers in English in a nation where most ppl don’t speak the language.
This leads into a discussion of the de facto hegemony of English-language scholarship in scientific publishing.
#SIGCIS2024
Fetterolf draws a contrast between the anthropomorphization of the Voder (“Voder for President!”) and the marginalization and/or devaluing of the feminized labor that enabled it to “speak.” Even a piece of tech w/a clearly visible operator was still framed as autonomous by the media. #SIGCIS2024
(As an aside, Fetterolf’s discussion of gender & technical labor is reminiscent of @sarambsimon.bsky.social’s presentation on the Voder at the most recent meeting of the Midwest Junto. Read more about her work here: bsky.app/profile/bhgross144.bsky.... #SIGCIS2024
Citing the work of @histoftech.bsky.social & Jennifer Light, Fetterolf situates the Voder operators (“Voderettes”) as part of a broader narrative of feminized labor in the history of computing, from ENIAC programmers to 21st c. “booth babes.” #SIGCIS2024
Fetterolf begins her talk w/a discussion of the “Supersecetary of the Coming Age” in Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think.”
This hypothetical machine, inspired by the Voder, would take dictation & type it up automatically. Bush doesn’t discuss secretarial labor in great detail. #SIGCIS2024
Welcome back to #SIGCIS2024! The first afternoon session is now underway. I’m in D-207 for three talks that discuss the negotiation of linguistic & cultural boundaries.
Our first speaker is Elizabeth Fetterolf, whose is presenting a paper on the Voder speech synthesizer at the 1939 World’s Fair.
@cperold.bsky.social asks Chan using “data collection” to describe what her actors were doing in the past.
Chan sympathizes w/the ?, but her intellectual commitment is to build conversations w/other fields because the community of scholars engaging w/these issues is quite small.
#SIGCIS2024
Andrew Meade McGee to Chan “I always find your work so elegant, but also terrifying…”
His question: How do we preserve rights & recognition for data outliers when systems often serve to document & respond to majoritarian trends?
Chan: Fight for humanities in educational institutions.
#SIGCIS2024
