A Sublime SIGCIS Meeting in Berkeley (SIGCIS 2026)
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/24/2026) — The Special Interest Group in Computing, Information and Society (SIGCIS) held its annual meeting at the Information School at the University of California, Berkeley on June 17th and 18th. The theme this year was “Known Error,” so designated to encourage sessions and papers “unpacking lessons from past technological missteps and their implications for the future.” The Organizing Committee put together an excellent Program of eleven sessions with over fifty papers. It was a hybrid event, with the vast majority of papers offered in-person. The presentations had tremendous geographical and thematic diversity, and included papers on race, labor, politics, postcolonialism, gender, sexuality, disability, privacy, cybersecurity, and other important topics of our digital world.
The Co-Chair of SIGCIS, Cal-Berkeley I-School’s Morgan Ames hosted the event and served on the Organizing Committee along with three past CBI Tomash Fellows Ekaterina (“Katya”) Babintseva (History, Carnegie Mellon University); Colette Perold (Media Studies, University of Colorado); and Honghong Tinn (HSTM and CBI, University of Minnesota); past CBI Norberg Grantee Gili Vidan (Cornell University), and CBI “Automation by Design” speaker and special issue author Jason Ludwig (University of California, Santa Barbara).
The event kicked off with a closed “Works in Progress,” session for participants to share and support each other’s scholarship in a small group setting, with each of the six graduate students participating (five Ph.D. students and one MLIS student) paired with a senior scholar from the SIGCIS community. Following this, past CBI Tomash Fellow Theodora Dryer (Water Justice and Technology Studio) and Cassius Adair (The New School for Social Research) facilitated a meaningful community discussion on our current scholarly research environment, a conversation that continued important topics and themes that had started on the SIGCIS Listserv.
There were ten regular sessions, with two always running concurrently. The sessions were recorded so registrants can watch the sessions they missed within a two-week window. This is something I definitely plan to do. At the same time as the session I chaired, I was especially sorry to miss CBI Research Fellow and Cornell University Associate Professor of STS Rebecca Slayton’s “‘No More Free Bugs’: The Co-Construction of Norms and Markets for Software Vulnerabilities.”
All five sessions I saw were superb, and I heard wonderful things, in discussion with colleagues, about the other five. In the session “Collective Intelligence in Theory and Practice,” I especially enjoyed past CBI Tomash Fellow and Johns Hopkins University’s Ksenia Tatarchenko and University of Tulsa’s Benjamin Peter’s presentation “The Substance of Thought: Digital Defiance and Collective Action in Dniprov’s ‘Igra.’” This was the telling of a fascinating work of literature contextualized within Soviet AI history.
Ksenia Tatarchenko also chaired a fascinating session organized by past CBI Tomash Fellow and University of Virginia Associate Professor of Data Science Mar Hicks, entitled “Off by One: Histories of Ignored and Submerged Computing Critics and Practitioners.” All four papers were marvelous, and Hicks’ “Reframing Race Histories of Computing in the Southeast,” a study uncovering hidden histories of standout computing education and research in under-resourced HBCU North Caralina Central University was spectacular. This school is in the Research Triangle but did not enjoy the investment largesse that the points (in two senses) of the triangle—University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and Duke University—received. Cassius Adair’s “Gender in the #InvoationNation: Historicizing the Trans-Tech Inclusion Consensus,” was also a wonderful paper in the session.
Late afternoon of day one, esteemed MIT Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Dwai Banerjee delivered a masterful keynote lecture: “Computing in the Age of Decolonization,” drawn from his path breaking new monograph of the same title (Princeton University Press, 2026). In research projects, and in expelling IBM from the country in the second half of the 1970s, India sought computing independence. Banerjee wove a rich narrative and analysis of how Cold War politics, trade imbalances, technocratic decisions by India’s government, and the short-sighted vision of chasing profits in information technology services inhibited progress toward this goal. Banerjee’s exquisite lecture sparked an engaging conversation in the question-and-answer period. His keynote was a true standout of the event; a tall order given a meeting filled with highlights. It also was an exclamation mark on the vital topic of postcolonialism, a topic that was often spotlit in the event’s sessions.
Before the official meeting started up again on day two, Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing David Hemmendinger presided over the in-person Editorial Board Meeting of the journal for 2026. Perold, Tinn, and Yost were among the board members participating.
Later in the morning of the second day, I was honored to chair a brilliantly conceived session organized by Princeton University Assistant Professor of Anthropology Beth Semel. The creatively titled session was “Nightmare Textures: The Ambiguity of Administrative Listening and Classificatory Torque.” Semel’s paper, “Administrative Compression: Listening and Speaking in the Automatic Clinic,” was one of my favorites of the event. It focused on automated systems designed to diagnose depressive disorders. Past CBI Norberg Grantee and Harvard University Assistant Professor of the History of Science Marc Aidinoff’s paper “‘Stop, LOOK & LISTEN:’ Broken Welfare Computers in Forest County, Mississippi,” was also a gem. Aidinoff’s study dealt with a computer glitch causing a double payment for social services and the harsh consequences this created for recipients who could not quickly return the erroneously allocated funds. I also really enjoyed the excellent papers by doctoral student in History of Science at Harvard University Kelsey Ichikawa and Western University’s Luke Stark, “Getting a Feeling for the Minutiae” and “Historicizing the Datafication of Canadian Homelessness Policymaking,” respectively. The session theme was perfect for these four papers, and discussant Jason Ludwig did a fabulous job framing the session and posing questions.
CBI Research Fellow, Co-Editor of Johns Hopkins University Press Computing and Culture book series with me (plus co-editor of our Just Code), and Chair of STS at University of California, Davis Gerardo Con Diaz chaired an early afternoon day two session, “Protocols of (In)Security.” This had four great papers, including two from CBI Norberg Grantees (one past, one current) The Max Plank Institute’s Jillian Foley and Cornell University doctoral candidate in Information Science Jordan Ali. Both presentations dealt with signatures in computer security, but of different types. In Foley’s case, it was digital signatures of cryptography for authentication, as she explored the “speculative technopolitics of 1990s encrypted messaging.” Alternatively, Ali focused on malware signatures, the cornerstone of detecting computer viruses.
Katya Babintseva chaired in the final time slot of the event, a session entitled “Domestic Data.” With deep interest in Indian computing, as well as in the history of cryptography, it too was one of my favorites. Brown University Assistant Professor of Anthropology Kim Fernandes kicked off the session with a strong paper entitled, “The Body as Error: Databasing Disability in Urban India.” Cornell University STS doctoral student Jai Vipra gave an incredible paper cleverly titled, “Maintenance is Our Middle Name: Computer Repair Expertise and the Indian State 1975-1991.” She drew from oral histories on the Computer Maintenance Corporation that she conducted, which she kindly has donated to CBI. Vipra’s talk paired nicely with Banerjee’s earlier keynote. Equally compelling, doctoral student in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania Jina Ji Youn Hyun gave an amazing presentation on the contexts of communication systems and cryptography in South Korea, which was entitled, “Project Memocall and the Politics of Computer Import and Localization in Cold War South Korea.” It was a perfect close to a sublime SIGCIS Meeting.
Jeffrey Yost