For historians: technology research that need not be about the last eighteen months
Nearly every claim made about AI today was made about an earlier machine. Historical work is the cheapest correction a field with a short memory can buy.
Technology journals tend to want recency, and historians are often asked to justify their work by its relevance to current policy. The request is usually met with a final section the author does not believe and the reader skips.
We do not ask for it. A well-evidenced account of how something came to be the way it is does not need a paragraph explaining why it matters.
What we publish
Archival research, comparative history and historiographical argument on computing, infrastructure, measurement, bureaucracy and automation. Work on the nineteenth century is as welcome as work on the 1990s, and the 1990s are badly under-served, recent enough to feel familiar, distant enough that the sources are going.
We are particularly interested in:
- Histories that decentre the United States and western Europe. The standard account of computing is a regional account presented as a universal one.
- Recovery of the labour inside systems described at the time as automatic, the people whose work the word "automatic" concealed.
- Histories of standards, classification and measurement, which shape more and are written about less.
- Infrastructure and empire: networks and logistics as instruments of rule.
Why this sits in the same journal as the empirical work
Because the arguments benefit from the collision. A paper claiming a current system is unprecedented is improved, or refuted, by someone who knows what happened the last three times. Keeping historians in a separate venue from the people making present-tense claims serves neither.
Practicalities
Peer reviewed by historians, double anonymous. No submission fee and no article processing charge - which matters disproportionately in a field where a great deal of excellent work is done by independent scholars, early-career researchers on short contracts and curators, none of whom have a publication budget.
Creative Commons licence, authors keep copyright, and the article is free to read from the day it appears.