*** Apologies for cross-postings *** Hello everyone, CALL FOR PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS: I'm writing this to invite you to the 4S 2021 (The Society for Social Studies of Science) open panel *#152 *"Scaling Software Studies (Inside) Out: Parallelization, Scalabilities, Distributed Computing Machineries, and Their Materialities." The 4S conference this year <https://www.4sonline.org/meeting/> will be an online/offline (Toronto, Canada) hybrid conference, from October 6th (Wed.) to 9th (Sat.). The deadline for submitting presentation abstracts (up to 250 words) is Monday, March 8th 2021, using the conference submission portal: https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/ssss21/. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions on this panel: ohy@rpi.edu; yoehan.oh@gmail.com. Looking forward to hearing from you! Kind regards, Yoehan *PANEL ABSTRACT* (also at https://www.4sonline.org/152-scaling-software-studies-inside-out-parallelization-scalabilities-distributed-computing-machineries-and-their-materialities/ ) Studies of information representation practices have shown that knowledge productions are conditioned by the affordances of those representing practices/systems like information architectures, classification schemas, and database management systems (Bowker & Star 2000; Bowker 2005; Poirier 2017) and that those systems’ affordances are materialized, carrying their own weight despite information’s supposed immateriality/virtuality (Edwards, 2010; Chun 2011; Dourish 2017; Jones 2017; Ribes 2017). Nevertheless, data processing practices having been parallelized and scaled out for last decades, from Google’s MapReduce, Spanner, BigTable (enabling to replace oligopolistic vendors’ proprietary software/hardware solutions with open-sourced/commodified software/hardware combinations), through Apache Hadoop (modeling Google’s distributed software), to Transformer (a more parallelizable deep-learning model, on which OpenAI’s GPT-3 was built) to name a few, have been less scrutinized, though these distributed practices contributed much to solving scalability issues (c.f. Ribes 2014) in ever-increasing resource-heavy computing systems, being epistemically infrastructured (Malazita & Resetar 2019). This panel seeks to collectively problematize those distributed systems for storing, indexing, retrieving, and pattern-recognizing data, and explore the themes/methods including, but not limited to, – How have distributed/parallel computing architectures (either software-or-hardware, or both) and algorithmic/programming models appeared in relation to others (Stevens 2013; Dourish 2016)? How are materialities and scalabilities related there? – Which hegemonic cultural/societal norms have those parallel systems and then-contemporary societies had in common (McPherson 2012)? – Are there any homogenizing, mono-cultural/geographical, or proprietary conditions these distributed computing machineries demand? By which methods would those conditions be noticed? What consequences follow? If those conditions should be cancelled/loosened, which alternatives (e.g. computing “of” the South) be needed (Amrute & Murillo 2020; Takhteyev 2012; Ochigame 2020)? *KEYWORDS* computing, distributed data processing, software studies, critical data studies, information infrastructure studies *REFERENCES* – Amrute, Sareeta, and Luis Felipe R. Murillo. “Introduction: Computing in/from the South.” *Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience *6, no. 2 (2020): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.34594 – Bowker, Geoffrey C. *Memory Practices in the Sciences. *Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. – Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. *Sorting Things Out: Classification and its consequences*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. – Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Always already there, or software as memory,” in *Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, *137-173. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015424.003.0008 – Dourish, Paul. “Algorithms and their others: Algorithmic culture in context.” *Big Data & Society *3, no. 2 (2016): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716665128 – Dourish, Paul. *The Stuff of Bits: An essay on the materialities of information. *Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10999.001.0001 – Edwards, Paul N. *A Vast Machine: Computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming. *Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. – Jones, Matthew L. “Querying the Archive: Data Mining from Apriori to PageRank.” In *Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures, *edited by Lorraine Daston, 311-328. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226432533.003.0012 – Malazita, James W., and Korryn Resetar. “Infrastructures of abstraction: how computer science education produces anti-political subjects.” *Digital Creativity *30, no. 4 (2019): 300-312. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2019.1682616 – McPherson, Tara. “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In *Race after the Internet, *edited by Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White, 21-37. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. – Ochigame, Rodrigo. “Informatics of the oppressed.” *LOGIC *11 (2020): 53-74. https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/ – Poirier, Lindsay. “A Turn for the Scruffy: An Ethnographic Study of Semantic Web Architecture.” In *Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference, *pp. 359-367. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1145/3091478.3091505 – Ribes, David. “Ethnography of scaling, or, how to fit a national research infrastructure in the room.” In *Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing, *pp. 158-170. 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531624 – Stevens, Hallam. *Life out of sequence: a data-driven history of bioinformatics. *University of Chicago Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226080345.001.0001 *CONVENOR(S): * Yoehan Oh. Ph.D. Candidate at Department of Science and Technology Studies, at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute; ohy@rpi.edu; yoehan.oh@gmail.com. -- Yoehan Oh Ph.D. Candidate Department of Science and Technology Studies The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Rensselaer Polytechnic institute 110 Eighth Street Troy, NY 12180 United States https://info.rpi.edu/people/yoehan-oh e-mail: ohy@rpi.edu ; yoehan.oh@gmail.com phone: (518) 368-1257 pronouns: he/him