[Air-L] literature on (social) history of the Internet

Kevin Driscoll driscollkevin at gmail.com
Wed Aug 5 06:34:48 PDT 2015


Hello Polina,

Other folks have already suggested some key works so here are just a few
additional resources that I've found useful.

The latest issue of Information & Culture is a special issue on internet
histories. The articles are not open access (yet) but the abstracts are on
the website. Please let me know if you can't find copies of the articles
you need:
* http://www.infoculturejournal.org/abstracts

SIGCIS, a special interest group of the Society for the History of
Technology concerned with the history of computing maintains collections of
syllabi and other resources on their website:
* SIGCIS Syllabus Repository, http://www.sigcis.org/syllabi
* SIGCIS History Resources, http://www.sigcis.org/resources

The BBS documentary is an incredibly thorough series by Jason Scott
(proprietor of textfiles.com) that focuses on early dial-up systems, mainly
in North America:
* https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary

Relevant to the upcoming conference, I also wanted to shout out everyone
that participated in the internet histories preconference organized by
Gerard Goggin and Mark McLelland at IR14:

"Appropriating the Internet: Alternative & Comparative Histories"
IR14, Denver, CO, USA, 2013
http://web.archive.org/web/20130831184519/http://ir14.aoir.org/preconference-workshops/preconference-workshop-appropriating-the-internet-alternative-comparative-histories/

As for my own drop in the bucket, my dissertation was about the social and
political implications of various internet histories. You may find the
introduction useful as a complement to some of other resources:
* Driscoll, Kevin. “Hobbyist Inter-Networking and the Popular Internet
Imaginary: Forgotten Histories of Networked Personal Computing, 1978-1998.”
Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2014.
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15799coll3/id/444362/rec/2
.

Best of luck and please do keep us posted. It's always exciting to see
historical work discussed on AIR-L!

Kevin Driscoll
http://kevindriscoll.info

(P.S. Apologies if you get two copies of this. It seems that the first one
didn't go through to the list.)

On Sun, Aug 2, 2015 at 6:01 PM, <air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
> Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 01:56:46 +0600
> From: Polina Kolozaridi <poli.kolozaridi at gmail.com>
> To: "air-l at listserv.aoir.org" <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> Subject: [Air-L] literature on (social) history of the Internet
> Message-ID:
>         <
CA+Ae1QBWO3ZFYi_UYYaLeGEGyWfkcu1rPCTfmWORmA61wCV9YQ at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Dear all,
>
> I am now writing a part of my dissertation about social history of the
> Internet and looking for some good sources on this subject (or just
history
> of the Internet).
>
> Could you please suggest me some articles/books about it?
>
> gratefully,
> Polina Kolozaridi
> *HSE Higher School of Economics, Moscow*
> *researcher, PhD candidate*
>
>



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