CSTHA call for papers

A call for papers has gone out for the XVth CSTHA conference, to be held in Toronto, October 11-14, 2007. It is to be co-hosted by the University of Toronto and Ryerson University. CSTHA is one of my favorite societies. It is a very big tent organization without a great deal of pretension.

In addition to the normal subject matter of the history of science, technology, and medicine in Canada, the program committee is interested in papers "relating to the scientific and technological aspects of Canadian environmental history."

The deadline for proposals is 6 May 2007. Get cracking!

Blueberries and Blackberries. A Pie? No, it's the British Association for Canadian Studies!

The British Association for Canadian Studies will be holding its 32nd annual conference at the University of Durham, 11-13 April 2007. Entitled: "From Blueberries to BlackBerries: Traditions and Technologies in Canada", according to the call for papers I just read, the deadline for proposals was 1 December 2006, which has already flown past. In any case, readers of this blog who find themselves in the UK next spring have something from home to look forward to.

SHOT and 4S

The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary at the next annual meeting in Washington, D.C., October 17-21, 2007. The theme of the conference (and the following year's) is "Looking Back, Looking Forward":

To that end, the Program Committee seeks papers or sessions for the 2007 meeting that concern the History of Technology as it has been practiced in the past, and for the 2008 meeting as it may or ought to be practiced in the future.

See the call for papers (pdf). The deadline for proposals in March 16, 2007.

The week before SHOT meets, 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) will be holding its annual conference in Montreal, October 11-13. The theme is "Ways of Knowing":

By this we mean several things: implicitly, that there are many ways of knowing any particular object, process, or event; that some of these ways of knowing have historically been more valued than others; and that processes of adjudicating ways of knowing have usually been neither nice nor neutral. So we are interested in processes of valuation (from the language of debates to acts of censorship) that result in one way of knowing as “the right one” or “the natural one.” We are interested in how people, groups, or cultures hold more than one way of knowing, and whether this is stable, durable, or problematic.

Details are on the 4S website. The deadline for proposals in February 1, 2007.

Computing for the masses not the classes

While it is too late to attend World of Commodore 2006 (Dec 1-3), maybe it is not too early to start planning for next year. The WOC is hosted each year by the Toronto Pet User's Group, the oldest computer user group in Canada. TPUG was founded in 1979 and is still going, though membership has declined from a peak exceeding 20,000 in the early 1980s.

For those still in the dark, Commodore was a personal microcomputer manufacturer in the 1970s and 1980s responsible for the highly successful Commodore PET, VIC-20, C64, and Amiga computers. Thanks to colour graphics and more memory than any other computer in the same price range, Commodore shipped over 20 million C64s after it was introduced in 1982, making it perhaps the most popular computer of all time. For a history of Commodore longer than two sentences, try http://www.commodore.ca, but a recent book on the subject should be enlightening. On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall promises to explore how a company founded to repair typewriters in Toronto in the 1950s rose so quickly to the top of microcomputing in the early 1980s only to fall even more dramatically a few years later. I have yet to read his book, but it's on my Christmas list.

Jim Butterfield, one of TPUG's founders and a phenomenal advocate of personal computing in the 1970s and 1980s, gave a nice historical talk on early microcomputing in Canada at the York University Computer Museum a few years ago. YUCoM has a substantial collection of Commodore computers, including a VIC-20 that was manufactured in Canada, and several SuperPETs, produced in collaboration with the University of Waterloo.

Upcoming conferences

In an effort to clear out conference announcements relevant to The Push Button Brain, I'm going to consolidate a number of them into one post. Some may or may not be immediately relevant to Canadian historians of technology and science, but should be interesting nonetheless. In no particular order:

• This is short notice, but why not head for Scientific research in World War II, 25-26 January 2007 in Museum Boerhaave, Leiden. This two-day conference will seek to explore how scientists managed to cope with the particular circumstances created by the war. We invite historians working on World War II, science, and scientific instruments to give their views and to elaborate on the theme. The deadline for papers has passed, but nonetheless it should be interesting. UPDATE (November 29): The preliminary program is now online.



• ICOTECH 2007 Copenhagen, Denmark, 14-18 August 2007. Deadline for proposals is 15 January 2007. Fashioning Technology: Design from Imagination to Practice is the symposium’s general theme. While open to all proposals dealing with the history of technology, the program committee suggests the following subthemes for the consideration of session organizers and contributors:
  
  • Consequences of design, purposeful and accidental
  • National styles in design and technology: myth or fact?
  • Embodying design in products
  • Social and/or cultural values in the design of products, machines andsystems
  • Designers: craftsmen, engineers, artists, or something else?
  • Fe/male designs: sex and gender in design
  • Tweaking technology and products: users as designers
  • Imaginary designs: unrealized, utopian and immaterial constructions
  • Design history in the context of the history of technology
  • Designing consumption from commodities to malls
  • Reshaping spaces: landscapes, cityscapes and technoscapes
  • The fashioned body: technologies of food, clothing and medicine
  • Building technoscience: design in the laboratory
  
  See the full Call for Abstracts for more information.



• The BSHS will be holding its 2007 conference at the University of Manchester, UK, Thursday 28 June - Sunday 1 July 2007. Papers are invited in all areas of the history of science, technology and medicine. Proposals for themed panels are particularly encouraged. See the call for papers for additional details. I do know there is interest in a session devoted to the history of computing, which would be rather appropriate given that the UK's National Archive for the History of Computing is as part of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Manchester.