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ACM History Committee

Presenters for Capturing Hidden ACM Heritage seminar

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This page includes descriptions of the project presentations from the Friday schedule for the seminar on Capturing Hidden ACM Heritage.

Work of the ACM-W Europe

Altin Rukiye, ACM-W Europe Chair

Ruth G. Lennon, ACM-W Global Chair

ACM-W Europe has the same mission of ACM-W, to encourage women in computing, especially those living in Europe. Understanding the region is essential as geographical, political, and cultural diversity is intrinsic to all collaborations. After ten years ACM-W Europe has been able to reflect the relationship between the ACM’s goals and values. In this talk, we highlight work by ACM-W Europe to help increase the numbers of women in computing and engineering fields, with particular consideration of diversity. We focus on current facts about women in Europe, including reports and recent publications. The project highlights challenges of diversity in Computer Science and related areas across Europe with data from events, past experiences, and other European statistics.

Website for ACM-W Europe: ​​https://acmweurope.acm.org/ 

Preserving the History of ACM SIGWEB (and Other SIGs)

Inna Kouper, Indiana University

This presentation draws on research that examined the role of ACM SIG on hypertext, hypermedia, and the web (SIGWEB) in maintaining interdisciplinarity and cohesiveness of hypertext research to discuss challenges of preserving SIGs heritage. The research generated a wide range of materials, including multimedia (photos and videos), documents (html and pdf files), interviews (recordings and notes), archives of older SIGWEB websites, and bibliographic data. Some of these documents are of archival quality as they come from the well-established ACM Records archive at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. Others were collected for the purposes of this research and may not be suitable for long term preservation due to inadequate quality, lack of permissions, or inappropriate formats. The presentation discusses these challenges and raises questions about balancing individual and institutional heritage preservation while working with both analog and born-digital materials. While not an active heritage preservation effort, this presentation provides a case study through which multiple preservation issues can be addressed. 

Website for ACM SIGWEB: https://www.sigweb.org/ 

Preserving our Software Heritage and its Stories

Roberto Di Cosmo, Director of the Software Heritage Initiative

Software source code is a part of our cultural heritage: it is our collective responsibility to ensure that it is not lost. This is the mission of Software Heritage, a non-profit organization launched by Inria in partnership with UNESCO. Under auspices of UNESCO, with University of Pisa we developed the Software Heritage Acquisition Process and more recently the “Software Stories” process and tools to present all the related materials.

Additional info: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3183558 (article from Oct. 2018 CACM; includes a 5 min. video summary of the first 5 years )

Others in the team: 

  • Carlo Montangero, Emeritus Professor at University of Pisa 
  • Elisabetta Mori, PhD in History of Computing
  • Morane Gruenpeter, Metadata Specialist at Software Heritage
  • Katherine Thornton and Kenneth Seals-Nutt, creators of Science Stories

SIGGRAPH’s archival project work

Bonnie Mitchell, Bowling Green State University and SIGGRAPH member

Jan Searleman, Clarkson University and SIGGRAPH member

These presenters have extensive experience building online archives for both the ACM SIGGRAPH organization and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), an affiliate of SIGGRAPH. In June 2022, these presenters ran a 2-day Summit on New Media Art Archiving in Barcelona, Spain. The are also co-directors of a project that will connect new media art archives from around the world.

Part 1: From Concept to Completion: Designing and Building an Online Archive

The notion of archiving an organization’s important materials online often seems trivial until one actually begins and then realizes the complexities of each and every step of the process. Oftentimes people do not know where to start. This talk focuses on the key components of how to go from the initial idea to the completion stage.

Part 2: ACM SIGGRAPH’s Online and Physical Archive: An Overview

The ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Art Archive was developed starting in 2016 and expanded in 2021 to include interconnected data from all aspects of the SIGGRAPH organization. One section of the archive focuses on collectibles, including items such as pins, T-shirts, ribbons, and other swag. The archive also contains information about conference presentations, exhibits, and screenings. The current target milestone will be the 50th SIGGRAPH conference celebration in the summer of 2023. Future plans include collecting archival information from the SIGGRAPH Pioneers, Professional and Student Chapters, Education Committee, Digital Arts Community, and the SIGGRAPH organization’s archival materials. To support access to primary sources while building the online archive, physical materials are being added to the SIGGRAPH Master Collection, which is temporarily housed at Bowling Green State University.

SIGGRAPH History website: https://history.siggraph.org/ 

History of SIGCSE and its conferences

Alison Clear, Eastern Institute of Technology, Auckland, NZ and SIGCSE chair

ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) celebrated 50 years of existence in 2018 and its 50th Technical Symposium in 2019. In addition to the Technical Symposiums, SIGCSE sponsors the ITiCSE, ICER, and CompEd conferences, for a total of more than 90 unique conferences. The information about the conferences was in many different locations, often under the ownership of volunteers. SIGCSE Historian Briana Morrison gathered and consolidated information about SIGCSE’s conferences, which is now on SIGCSE’s website. During SIGCSE’s year of celebration, Briana created 50 posts about SIGCSE’s history, with information about each conference SIGCSE had sponsored. The results, essentially a digital scrapbook for each conference, are presented on SIGCSE’s website (https://sigcse.org/events/50years.html); another page on the SIGCSE website presents the SIGCSE’s board history (https://sigcse.org/about/board-history/). The project has also considered a plan to collect member submissions about additional historical content. 

History of the ACM/IEEE Supercomputer Conference

Kevin Walsh, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and SIGHPC member

Supercomputing and the high-performance computing community, as an international collective, have contributed more than any other community to the world of pervasive computing in which we live. HPC includes computing, networking, visualization, storage, and data analytics. We have a variety of physical artifacts, photos, videos, oral history interviews of supercomputing pioneers, conference proceedings, and conference committee records from 1988 to the present. We will present our challenges and progress to date, as well as our plan to launch a SIGHPC History Chapter at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November 2022.