Dr. Thomas Haigh
Assistant Professor
Dr. Haigh has enjoyed a busy and rewarding past several months. He was elected the chair of the ASIS&T Special Interest Group on the History and Foundations of Information Science at the recent annual meeting in Milwaukee and helped to organize a planning session to develop strategies to revitalize the SIG and forge stronger connections between ASIS&T and historians with related interests.
In October, Dr. Haigh attended the Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Washington, DC. Dr. Haigh chairs its special interest group on Computers, Information and Society. That same month, he attended the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Montreal, where he organized a panel on “Knowing with Computers: How Software and Systems Encapsulate Expertise” and presented a paper entitled "Knowing Numbers: How Numerical Software Libraries Changed Scientific Practice, 1954-1975".
In November, Dr. Haigh attended another planning meeting on information science history and gave a presentation to the Graduate School of Library & Information Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His presentation, “The Secret History of Open Source Software Practices: Their Corporate and Scientific Origins, 1954-1980,” was sponsored by the Progressive Librarians Guild Student Chapter and the ASIS&T Student Chapter.
Dr. Haigh also was awarded a fellowship by UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies (http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/21st/) for the 2007-08 academic year. The Center selected his proposal “Knowing Information: The Social History of Information in American Business” as a winner in this highly competitive fellowship, which provides its fellows with office space, research assistance, and a reduction to a one course per semester researching load in order to support interdisciplinary research and create a space for intellectual exchange across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Dr. Haigh is the first faculty member from SOIS to earn this honor.
