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38th annual meeting : Glasgow, U.K. : on August 5th, 2011 at 16:00–17:58 Location: Lecture Theatre 1, Boyd Orr Building, University of Glasgow
:: Minutes of General Assembly 2011 [as PDF file, 280 kB] Opening Words by the President The General Assembly was opened by President James Williams, who was pleased that the 38th ICOHTEC Symposium took place in Glasgow and in the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world. The site is appropriate for the conference focusing on the theme Consumer Choice and Technology. He thanked the hosts from three universities of Glasgow for inviting ICOHTEC to hold its symposium on their premises. He was also grateful to the ICOHTEC’s Pro-gramme Committee for compiling an exciting scientific programme. Report by the Secretary General Timo Myllyntaus stated that the past academic year had been thriving for ICOHTEC. The successful Tampere conference of about 330 attendants provided a good basis for various activities. The new achievement was setting up the prize of 500 euro that was titled Maurice Daumas Prize. It will be awarded annually to the best article on the history of technology published within two previous calendar years. It is dedicated to Professor Maurice Daumas, one of the founding fathers of ICOHTEC and famous French historian of technology. The prize is sponsored by the French Univer-sité de Technologie Belfort-Montbéliard. Thanks to the donations by Fundación Juanelo Turriano and Division of History of Science and Technology (DHST/IUHPS), this year ICOHTEC was able to award travel grants of 300 euro to eight applicants from seven countries. All grantees delivered their papers at the Glasgow symposium. In the Glasgow symposium we for the first time used an online submission system with integrated evaluation extensions. The software was programmed and tailored for ICOHTEC meetings by Antti-Jussi Nygård from Turku University. This system makes the work of the Programme Committee easier and more efficient and enables to compile the scientific programme in a shorter time than our previous practices. Since our meeting in Budapest in 2009 we have put special effort into recruiting new members and this campaign has achieved positive results. Our extended travel grant programme, new student-friendly annual fee category and publications prizes are to support this goal. In future we are looking for new ways to support the research on the history of technology and more proactive networking among researchers. In addition, we keep on working to develop our symposia in order to make them ever more inspiring and diverse discussion forums. Preparations of the Symposia of 2012 and 2013 The next ICOHTEC symposium will be held in Barcelona where preparations have already com-menced. The Local Organising Committee is chaired by Antoni Roca-Rosell. The main theme Tech-nology, the Arts and Industrial Culture is inspired by the artistic, architectural and industrial his-tory of Barcelona and surrounding Catalonia. According to ICOHTEC’s traditions under the um-brella of the main theme, there will be several subthemes as well as a section for diverse special topics. The confirmed dates of the symposium are from Tuesday 10 to Saturday 14 of July 2012. All interested in this new multidisciplinary ICOHTEC Symposium are invited to submit their session, paper or poster proposals by the end of January and travel grant applications a couple of months later. The 2013 ICOHTEC symposium will be held in conjunction with the DHST/IUHPS congress. The GA supported the idea that ICOHTEC aims at a greater visibility in this congress than in the previous similar congresses. The 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine will be hosted by the City of Manchester between 22nd and 28th July 2013. The overall theme will be Knowledge at Work. ICOHTEC is to organise several sessions in the congress; it therefore invites both members and non-members to send complete session proposals by 15 February. These proposals are to contain at minimum three thematically related paper proposals per a time slot dealing with the history of technology. Election of New Members to the Executive Committee The General Assembly (GA) is the highest decision making body of ICOHTEC and it used its power to elect three new members to the Executive Committee. In accordance with the stepwise rotation system for the Executive Committee’s posts, the GA was to elect three persons. The Executive Committee had proposed in its meeting (ECM) to elect Maria Elvira Callapez (Portugal), Masaaki Okada (Japan) and Klaus Staubermann (UK/D) for four-year posts. As a result the Executive Com-mittee for 2011 – 2012 is composed of the following twelve elected members plus the former president Hans-Joachim Braun and seven officers:
Nomination of Committees for 2011 – 2012 The Executive Committee held its meeting in Glasgow on 2 August and set up following six com-mittees: The next ICOHTEC symposium will be held in Spain. Because both the site, the capital of Catalonia, and the main theme are attractive, the EC considered it appropriate to nominate an extended Barcelona Programme Committee consisting of the following six members: Jan Kunnas (chair), Nina Möllers, Markku Norvasuo, Masaaki Okada, and Antoni Roca-Rosell. Since ICOHTEC intends to organise a number of sessions in the 24th International Congress of His-tory of Science, Technology and Medicine (ICHSTM), the EC resolved to set up a special Manchester Programme Committee for the representation of ICOHTEC in this congress. The committee includes four members: Mark Clark (chair), Maria Elvira Callapez, Anne-Katrin Ebert and Christopher Neumaier. The ICOHTEC deadline for submissions (Mid-February 2012) will be followed by other important deadlines; See the key dates of the congress organisers at: www.meeting.co.uk/confercare/ichst2013 Since 2008 ICOHTEC has announced the Book Prize (3,000 €) for Young Scholars (under 38 years old), which has been generously sponsored by the Juanelo Turriano Foundacion (JTF). This year the ICOHTEC Prize Committee was chaired by Dick van Lente, while two other members were Robert Belot and Thomas Zeller. The ECM decided to nominate these three scholars for another year. Furthermore, if submissions in Russian or Spanish will be received, the EC will nominate 1–2 additional members. The GA urged to deliver an announcement of the prize in early September 2010. The call is to include the same guidelines as last year: apart from submissions in English, those in other official ICOHTEC languages (French, German, Russian or Spanish) will be accepted and all submissions should contain a summary of 4500 words (10–15 typewritten pages) in English. The deadline for submission is 23 January 2012. Further details on the prize will be available in the autumn issues of the ICOHTEC Newsletter. Historians of technology responded very positively to call for papers to the contest of our new ar-ticle prize; that is a good start. The ECM invited Andrew Butrica to the new Maurice Daumas Prize Committee and in order to make it even more capable to evaluate submissions in French. Three present members (Martina Heßler, Pierre Lamard and Anna Storm) were elected to their second term. Storm had already expressed her willingness to continue as the chairperson of this commit-tee. The ECM invited the members of the Glasgow TG Committee (Patrice Bret, Timo Myllyntaus, chair and James Williams) also to the next Barcelona Travel Grant Committee. The ECM considered that for the case of elections and nominations at the 2012 symposium, the entire Executive Committee can serve as the Nomination Committee.
Report by the Treasurer The General Assembly listened to the report by the Treasurer Patrice Bret. The present fees are for graduate students and Ph.D. candidates 15 euro (20 USD), for individuals 30 euro (40 USD) or for institutional members 75 euro (100 USD). It was suggested to keep these fees unchanged except that students are requested to pay the fees of two years in one instalment in order to save bank-ing fees. More than thirty new members, especially from Finland, France and Italy, have joined in ICOHTEC since the Tampere conference in August 2010. After hearing the report by the auditor Antoni Roca-Rosell, the General Assembly resolved to approve the accounts of the past financial year. Changing the organisation’s domicile from Bath, Britain to Paris, France has progressed but for-malities with the new bank have taken more time than expected.
Report by the Editor of ICON Editor Mark Clark reported that he is working on publishing ICON volumes 15 and 16. The former will contain eleven articles and six book reviews. The volume will be printed as soon as authors will send their comments to page proofs. The latter volume is a special issue based on papers pre-pared by a research network Technology in Everyday Life organised by Timo Myllyntaus and Riikka Jalonen. Manuscripts will be submitted to the editor within the coming months. An agreement for electronic distribution of ICON, including indexing the titles and authors of articles, have been un-der preparation for some time and will be signed with EBSCO shortly. ICOHTEC will keep ICON’s publisher rights, and digital indexing will not compete with the complete paper version of the yearbook. The editor has designed a new cover for the future issues of ICON and its major feature will be our new logo. In discussion, Wolfhard Weber expressed his concern about Mark Clark’s earlier suggestion on starting to publish the ICON in an electronic format. He considered that switching to electronic publishing ICOHTEC may lose the control of the ICON and its publishing rights. He was also worried how the members of the organisation and other subscribers of the journal will react, if they will not receive any more paper copies of ICON. He was replied that the representatives of ICOHTEC has negotiated with EBSCO only on indexing the contents of the already published ICON volumes and publishing these indexes in the digital format — not about handing over the publishing rights of the forthcoming volumes of the journal to any commercial firm.
Report by the Editor of the Newsletter Editor Stefan Poser took pleasure to inform the EC that the Newsletter was published regularly every month during the past academic year. A new feature of the Newsletter is to publish reports on various exhibitions and museum events in the field of the history of technology.
Report by the Webmaster Webmaster Slawomir Lotysz showed the present outlook and features of our website on the screen. This new version was launched at the Tampere Conference last year. A novel section of the website is Books’ Corner which shortly presents recent books researched and written by the members and friends of ICOHTEC. The present website provides much more information than its earlier versions and provides printing facilities of the contents also in PDF format. During the past year, the website was transferred to a new server. In cooperation with Stefan Poser and Antti-Jussi Nygård, Lotysz has improved the efficiency of our web services.
Various Items Hans-Joachim Braun reported on plans to set up the series of ICOHTEC Summer Schools, which would help recruiting new people to our ranks. Spain would be a splendid site for the first summer school in 2012. The theme could be ‘Civil Engineering and Architecture in History’. Engineering de-sign could be included as a subtheme. This summer school could be arranged just before or after the Barcelona symposium. The main problem is the funding of the summer school. It was decided that within the next two months, Braun will cooperate with Antoni Roca-Rosell in investigating sources of funding. If there will be a firm funding plan by mid-October, we will go ahead and or-ganise a small summer school. The Call for Papers to this school should be launched in November 2011 at the latest. Francesco Gerali proposed to open a special section on our website where doctoral students could report on and discuss their dissertations and research plans. This kind of the Ph.D. Candidates’ Corner would help networking of young researchers. * * * Finally, President James Williams expressed his sincere thanks to the local organisers and espe-cially Christine Leslie for hosting an inspiring symposium. After ensuring how grateful ICOHTEC is also to all others who contributed to the 38th symposium he closed the General Assembly at 17:58. Page updated: September 16, 2011 |
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