Winner:

Belcher, Oliver. “Sensing, Territory, Population: Computation, Embodied Sensors, and Hamlet Control in the Vietnam War,” Security Dialogue 50.5, 416-436 (2019).

Prize Citation:

Oliver Belcher – a geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University – has written a remarkable history of the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) created and deployed by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. As Belcher details, the story of HES is an important episode both in the history of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and in the history of U.S. “pacification” actions in Vietnam. Particularly striking are Belcher’s arguments that U.S. military advisors acted as “embodied sensors” for HES, and that their transformations of the realities of village life into the data format of HES constituted a form of “epistemic violence” implicated in the broader landscape of physical violence during the war. In this, Belcher positions his study as a contribution to a “history of computers as a technology of imperial violence.”

Winner:

Menon, Nikhil. "‘Fancy Calculating Machine’: Computers and planning in independent India." Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 421-457.

Prize Citation:

Nikhil Menon’s fascinating history details and contextualizes the efforts of statistician P. C. Mahalanobis to import a first digital computer to India in the 1950s. As Menon demonstrates, Mahalanobis’ many attempts to secure a computer – from the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom – were central to the national project of economic development and planning, rather than military use. Against a backdrop of decolonization and the Cold War, Mahalanobis was hamstrung in his attempts to source a computer from the United States for his politics, by perceptions that he was too close to the Soviet Union. The Mahoney Prize committee commends Menon for a well-written, rich article based on detailed archival research, which speaks at once to India’s isolation from and connections to the ‘centres’ of computing and key figures of the era. The article evokes not just a history of computers and of Indian national development, but also scholarly meetings, negotiations with governments, and inter-departmental jockeying in an earlier era of ‘big data.’

Winner:

Jaroslav Švelch, Gaming the Iron Curtain How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018).

Prize Citation:

Jaroslav Švelch’s Gaming the Iron Curtain makes an important and fascinating intervention into the history of computing, challenging many basic categories in the field. The history of computing has long privileged the United States and Western Europe. Particularly during the Cold War, these regions have been treated as the primary sources of innovation and novelty, in contrast with the presumed computing backwaters of Soviet Bloc nations and the developing world. Gaming the Iron Curtain challenges this view, showing that computer users and developers in communist Czechoslovakia demonstrated considerable innovation despite and even because of their limited access to Western technology. They developed novel computers and games, creatively modified and built upon pirated code, and built hardware gaming interfaces from available materials. They also alternately utilized (“gamed”) the resources and practices of a centralized state, and critiqued the politics of that state. The book reveals the movement of technology across national borders and through an Iron Curtain that many have assumed to be impenetrable, making a significant contribution to the understanding of computing as a transnational activity. It highlights the distinctive ways in which gaming culture evolved in an environment that was not dominated by mass produced commercial technology and magazines. The book represents an impressive feat of empirical research, based on oral histories and previously unused archival sources. Finally, the book is beautifully written, providing a great deal of historical and theoretical framing while maintaining a lively and engaging narrative.

We're excited to present the conference program for the SIGCIS 2019 Conference, EXCEPTION ERROR: Fatal, Illegal, Unknown. The conference takes place on Sunday, October 27, in Milan, Italy - on the final day of the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.

We've got a terrific program featuring our keynote speaker, Prof. Gerardo Con Diaz, Assistant Professor, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of California-Davis. We'll begin by announcing the 2019 winners of SIGCIS Prizes and Grants: the CHM Book Prize, Mahoney Prize, and SIGCIS Travel Awards.

To register, please visit SHOT's website, where you have the option to register for the entire SHOT conference or the Sunday SIGCIS conference only. Please take a look at the program for the SHOT Annual Meeting itself, packed with exciting sessions and papers (including several on computing and information history), as well as the traditional Friday SIGCIS lunch meeting.