[Air-L] call for participants for AOIR panel - That was Then, This is Now

[Ilana Gershon]

We would like to have one or two more people on a panel for AOIR on
social change.

Please let me know if you would be interested in participating on the
following panel:

That was Then, This is Now

This panel begins with a thought exercise.Each panelist has chosen a 
classic text from their home discipline and asks: what would happen if 
the author of that text revisited that topic today, using tools, 
techniques, or perspectives shaped by recent innovations in information 
technology and/or the digital humanities?We are building on a question 
that one of our panelists, the historian of computing Nathan Ensmenger, 
asks in his article "The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking 
the History of Computers in Society," about Bruno Latour's ground 
breaking ethnography of scientific practice, Laboratory Life.If Latour 
were to revisit the Salk Institute, what would he make of the pervasive 
presence of computers, computer-based instruments, and computational 
metaphors?How would this change the ways in which he did his research, 
his interpretation of the role of (increasingly digital) inscription 
devices, or his conclusions about the ways in which social interaction 
shapes the formation of scientific knowledge?Each of our panelists will 
perform a similar thought experiment as a starting point for thinking 
about the historical transformations happening both to one's object of 
analysis and to the practice of scholarship in the Internet era.




Please keep in mind that abstracts are due March 13th.
Apologies for the short notice,
Ilana