This conference, the launch event for the Social Studies of Information group in the Siegen University iSchool, brings together a distinguished group of international scholars to examine different aspects of computing and its history through the lens of work. We humans spend most of our waking lives working. Work includes cultural, intellectual, managerial, and emotional labor as well as physical toil. Despite this, most work by humanities and media scholars implicitly treats the study of work as marginal or uninteresting. Even the study of “digital practices” rarely engages with the specifics of the workplace, despite the importance of distributed micro-practices like clickworking. Information technology underpins the transformation of work today, as it has it in the past.

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that address computing as work practice, both on a local, situated, infrastructural level. Speakers will be exploring many kinds of work, from the work of computerized literary production to the work of scientific research. We believe that close attention to the social processes of work has the cross-cutting potential to integrate a variety of historical, social and ethnographic research approaches, from labor history to the scientific ethnography to the study of media practices as cooperative accomplishments, into a revealing whole.

Keynote Speakers:

• Matthew Jones, James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University.
• Matthew Kirschenbaum, Professor of English, University of Maryland.
• Fred Turner, Professor of Communication, Stanford University.
• Kjeld Schmidt, Professor of Work, Technology & Organization, Copenhagen Business

Participation is free. Please register in advance with Anja Höse: anja.hoese@sfb1187.uni-siegen.de.

Supported by the Siegen University iSchool, the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation”, Siegen and the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research North Rhine- Westphalia.

Below you will find videos of most of the panels and discussion from the program.