This talk will focus on the progress and updates made to the ACM SIGGRAPH History Archive over the past year. The archive is an online repository and physical collection of artifacts and documents from the ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques and includes both documentation of conference and organization events. The archive team is co-directed by Bonnie Mitchell and Jan Searleman and consists of student interns and volunteers from the SIGGRAPH community. Some of the volunteers focus on a particular task such as image processing whereas other team members focus on data entry and scanning. The archive also is supported by a large group of SIGGRAPH community members through donations of materials, support for the student interns, and advice. Members of the team will speak about their roles and the successes and challenges they faced. We will also talk about the physical archive and its future. This session will also be an opportunity for the SIGGRAPH community to offer suggestions and assistance in helping to make the past 50 years of SIGGRAPH conferences as well as information about the organization available to researchers, academics, and the community at large.
Bonnie Mitchell is a new media artist and Professor at Bowling Green State University in Digital Arts, in Bowling Green, Ohio, USA. Mitchell is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH History and Digital Arts Committee where she focuses on the development of the SIGGRAPH archives and coordination of the SPARKS lecture series. Mitchell’s artworks explore spatial and experiential relationships to our physical, social, cultural, and psychological environment through interaction, abstraction and audio. Her current creative practice focuses on development of physically immersive environments using interaction via electronics and special FX to reveal change over time. Her work has been exhibited internationally at numerous venues.
Jan Searleman taught Computer Science at Clarkson University for 37 years, retired in 2015, and since retirement has been an Adjunct Research Professor at Clarkson. Her research areas are Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence. In 1979, Jan, along with colleague James Lynch, established a major in Computer Science. She was also instrumental in creating Clarkson’s MS and PhD in Computer Science. Jan created and taught a variety of CS courses, including Artificial Intelligence in 1979, and Computer Graphics in 1980 (in the days of a green dot on a black screen). In the 1990s, she created a student lab in Virtual Reality, and introduced a course on Virtual Environments. A senior member of the ACM since 1976, and of SIGGRAPH since 1978, Jan established Clarkson’s ACM student chapter in 1980. She also created Clarkson’s ACM SIGGRAPH student chapter. She advised both chapters until her retirement.