Researching gender in the history of the Internet and the Web. A roundtable at the SHOT 2023 conference

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the SHOT program at https://www.historyoftechnology.org/annual-meeting/2023-shot-annual-meeting-october-2023-california/.

2 Evangelina Villegas is a Mexican cereal biochemist whose work led to the development of high-quality protein maize. She shared the 2000 World Food Prize for this achievement.

3 More information about the Mahoney Prize at: https://www.sigcis.org/mahoneyprize.

4 Diversity, equity and inclusion.

5 See http://queerdigital.com.

6 See Nakamura, 2014.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janet Abbate

Janet Abbate is a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech (USA) and Co-director of the STS graduate program in Northern Virginia. Her research focuses on the history, culture, and politics of computing and the Internet. Her 2012 book Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing explores how gender has shaped computing and how the experiences of female software pioneers can inform current efforts to broaden participation in science and technology. Her current research interests include gender and computing; how perceptions of expertise and opportunity contribute to underrepresentation of women and minorities; and the history and cultural significance of computer science as an intellectual discipline.

Cassius Adair

Cassius Adair is an Assistant Professor at The New School, Department of Media Studies, New York (USA). Cassius Adair uses mixed methods, inducing oral histories, to study the contributions of trans women and trans feminine people to computing and Internet cultures, tracing the lives of these trans technologists alongside larger histories of gendered labor divisions within technology corporations, showing how changing labor practices in computing permitted the tech industry to become an extraordinary site of employment for a certain class of white trans subjects.

Avery Dame-Griff

Avery Dame-Griff is a Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at Gonzaga University (USA). He founded and serves as primary curator of the Queer Digital History Project, an independent community history project cataloging and archiving pre-2010 LGBTQ spaces online. His book, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (NYU Press, 2023) tracks how the Internet transformed transgender political organizing from the 1980s to the contemporary moment.

Autumn Edwards

Autumn Edwards is a Professor of communication at Western Michigan University (USA) where she also co-directs the Communication and Social Robotics Labs. She is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Human-Machine Communication, which focuses on the theory and practice of communication with and about digital interlocutors, including social robots, technologically-augmented persons (cyborgs), and communication in augmented, virtual, and mixed-reality environments.

Leopoldina Fortunati

Leopoldina Fortunati, Senior Professor, teaches Social Robotics at the University of Udine (Italy). She is ICA fellow and member of the Academia Europaea. She is associate editor of the journal The Information Society. Her research interests focus on feminist and gender perspective in respect to the adoption and appropriation of digital technologies, on the role of the mobile phone and the Internet on co-constructing social relationships, and on analogue and digital journalism.

Deena Larsen

Deena Larsen is an independent artist. She is interested in Wikipedia and the WikiProject Women writers/Women electronic literature writers which is attempting to bridge some gaps by collating information about women and transgender writers in this field.

Laine Nooney

Laine Nooney is an Assistant Professor of Media Industries at New York University (USA). They recently published The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, a software history of the iconic Apple II personal computer (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Laine Nooney is specializing in historical, cultural, and economic analysis of the video game and computer industries, and is a founding editor of ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories. Nooney’s work has been published in Game Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Information and of Play, Journal of Visual Culture, The Atlantic.

Valérie Schafer

Valérie Schafer is a Professor in Contemporary European History at the C²DH (Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg and an Associate Researcher at the Center for Internet and Society (CNRS, France). She specialises in the history of computing, telecommunications, and data networks. Her main research interests are the history of the Internet and the Web, the history of European digital cultures and infrastructures, and born-digital heritage (especially Web archives). She is a co-founder of the journal Internet Histories. Digital Technology, Culture and Society.