Mahoney Prize
The Mahoney Prize recognizes an outstanding article in the history of computing and information technology, broadly conceived. The Mahoney Prize commemorates the late Princeton scholar Michael S. Mahoney, whose profound contributions to the history of computing came from his many articles and book chapters. The prize consists of a $500 award and a certificate. For the 2024 prize, articles published in the preceding three years (2021, 2022 and 2023) are eligible for nomination. The Mahoney Prize is awarded by the Special Interest Group in Computers, Information, and Society (SIGCIS). We plan to present the prize at the SIG’s annual meeting in July.
Please email copies of articles being nominated to the 2024 Prize Committee by April 15, 2024. Self-nominations are welcome, as are nominations from the SIG’s membership. Please direct any questions to the 2024 committee chair, Janet Toland.
2024 Mahoney Prize Winner:
Corinna Schlombs. “Built on the Hands of Women: Data, Automation, and Gender in West Germany’s Financial Industry” Technology and Culture 64, no. 1 (January 2023): 63-89. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2023.0002.
“Built on the Hands of Women” explores the topic of data entry which has been neglected in the history of computing. Though under-explored, achieving efficient, large scale data entry was a pressing concern in the early days of mainframe business computing, and continues to be important today. Schlombs’ detailed research consists of two in-depth case studies of different approaches taken by German finance companies to address this issue. Allianz insurance company adopted a technological solution, while Sparkassen savings bank went for a sociotechnical approach. Utilizing detailed archival sources Schlombs explores the implications of these differing tactics focusing particularly on the consequences for the female workforce employed for data entry. The cases are firmly situated in the social, political, and economic climate of midcentury post-war Germany.
The article offers an outstanding critique of labour relations and in particular establishes that white-collar work can have a real physical impact on employees, even down to the food they are provided with. The technological details of the development of equipment used for data entry are well positioned in the broader international literature. Schlombs draws on novel archival materials demonstrating expert use of sources in English and German. She offers a carefully written detailed history which is highly original. Her research into data entry undercovers a crucial component of computing history which has been overlooked despite being an essential precondition for computerization. The research is transnational in perspective and opens up a generative area for future scholarship.
2024 Mahoney Prize Committee:
Janet Toland (Chair)
Adjunct
School of Information Management
Victoria University of Wellington
Kevin Driscoll
Associate Professor,
Department of Media Studies
University of Virginia
David Murphy
Senior Lecturer,
Digital, Tech, Innovation & Business
Staffordshire University
Previous winners:
2023: Hannah Zeavin. “‘This Is Womenspace’: USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983–86.” Technology and Culture 63, no. 3 (July 13, 2022): 634–64.
2022: Theodora Vardouli and David Theodore, “Walking Instead of Working: Space Allocation, Automatic Architecture, and the Abstraction of Hospital Labor,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 43, no. 2 (April-June 2021): 6-17.
2021: Colette Perold, “IBM’s World Citizens: Valentim Bouças and the Politics of IT Expansion in Authoritarian Brazil,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 42, no. 3 (July-September 2020): 38-52.
2020: Oliver Belcher. “Sensing, Territory, Population: Computation, Embodied Sensors, and Hamlet Control in the Vietnam War,” Security Dialogue 50.5, (2019) 416-436.
2019: Nikhil Menon. "‘Fancy Calculating Machine’: Computers and planning in independent India." Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 421-457.
2018: Joanna Radin. “Digital Natives: How Medical and Indigenous Histories Matter for Big Data.” Osiris Vol. 32, No. 1 (2017): 43-64
2017: Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson, “’One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech.” Computational Culture (January 15, 2016).
2016: Andrew L. Russell and Valérie Schafer, "In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s," Technology and Culture 55, no. 4 (October 2014): 880-907.
2015: David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerard Alberts, "When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960," Technology and Culture 55 (January 2014): 40-75.
