[ih] Call for papers for the Internet histories journal : Arpanet (1969-2019)

[John Levine]

In article <nyjfjh2rbsymdsou0ri05p75.1506145796907 at email.android.com> you write:
>The academic computing historians will read it.  Their writings will be the archive of history when the participants are gone. 

Maybe, maybe not.  I don't recognize any of the editors' names, and the
articles do not fill me with insight or delight:

An article in the first issue:

 Towards a nonlinear, material history of digital swarms

 Abstract

 In contemporary internetworked societies, digital media and networks
 have increasingly become a “battlefield” where, following the
 emergence of novel power relations, new forms of resistance have come
 to the fore. Amongst these resistances, there are the so-called
 “digital swarms”. This is a communicational disruption also
 technically known in computing as “Distributed Denial-of-Service”
 (DDoS): a form of political dissent that, in the last years, has hit
 the headlines, thanks to the digital media actions of Anonymous. This
 article focuses on these forms of mediation, approaching digital
 swarms via a historical analysis that stresses nonlinearity and
 materiality. I argue that digital swarming actions cannot be read as
 an issue of obtaining attention through media visibility, and that the
 disruptions these lead to cannot be accounted as mere metaphors of
 street political action, finding conversely their cultural history in
 other forms of media disruptiveness. This historical excavation
 points, then, towards a different genealogy for digital swarms,
 acknowledging the key material dimensions at stake via the
 infrastructural character of disruptive mediations as well as via
 non-anthropomorphic patterns of enunciation.

I can't tell whether this is a history of DDoS or what.  I do know
that "digital swarms" is not a term which means anything.  If I were
running a library, $1,913 for their online something package would not
be high on my budget priority list.

The IEEE publishes Annals, a perfectly good quarterly computing
history journal that is reasonably priced and is widely available.
It's had lots of Arpanet and Internet articles.  If you want to write
about Arpanet history, write for them.

R's,
John