Thomas Haigh: Recent Travel and Research

Thomas Haigh, assistant professor in SOIS, used this summer to present his work in diverse professional forums. He delivered lectures at three conferences and workshops. At the Workshop on the History of the Internet and its Impacts at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, he presented a draft of his chapter on “Web Browsers and Email: The Software infrastructure of the Commercializing Internet.” MIT Press will publish the chapter next year in a volume on the recent business history of the Internet.

At the workshop Computers in Use: Historical and Social Perspectives at Manchester University, UK, Professor Haigh presented his paper “Blue Collars, White Shirts: The Conflicted Identity of 1950s Punched Card Men."

And at the Annual Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology in Leicester, UK, he lectured on “SHARE and the Origins of Open Source Software, 1954-1972.”

Some of Professor Haigh’s work also became more widely available. The journal ACM SIGMORD Record published a revised and updated version of his article “’A Veritable Bucket of Facts:’ Origins of the Data Base Management System” in its June 2006 issue (pp. 33-49). Moreover, two of his oral history interviews, with Charles W. Bachman and Walter M. Carlson, are now obtainable online through the ACM Digital Library (or through Haigh’s personal website, www.tomandmaria.com/tom). Bachman won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Turing award and created the first database management system. Carlson is a former ACM president. Professor Haigh’s has also conducted interviews with members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics which are available through history.siam.org.

Professor Haigh was also asked to chair the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s (ASIS&T SIG) Special Interest Group on the History and Foundations of Information Science. He will seek election for next year, to take over at the Milwaukee meeting in 2007.