Social Science Technical Systems And Cooperative Work

The "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of the social scientists to computer supported cooperative work has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. This book is the first to address directly the problem of how to bridge the divide. It offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory, and will constitute a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics.

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

This book seeks to establish an interdisciplinary, applied social scientific model for researchers and students that advocates a cooperative effort between machines and people. After showing that basic research on social processes offers much needed guidance for those creating technology and designing tools for group work, its papers demonstrate the mutual relevance of social science and information system design, and encourage better integration of these disciplines. This comprehensive collection closely examines the variety of electronic tools being deployed to solve traditional problems in communication and coordination. Unfortunately, research shows that these tools have not been as successful as their designers had envisioned, partially because they were not always produced with the needs and goals of their human users in mind. The editors' goal is to entice more social scientists to orient their research around questions of practical interest to information system designers and to convince designers to search for the knowledge about social and organizational behavior that would make their tools more useful.

The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, comprising of seven volumes, now in its fourth edition, compiles the contributions of major researchers and practitioners and explores the cultural institutions of more than 30 countries. This major reference presents over 550 entries extensively reviewed for accuracy in seven print volumes or online. The new fourth edition, which includes 55 new entires and 60 revised entries, continues to reflect the growing convergence among the disciplines that influence information and the cultural record, with coverage of the latest topics as well as classic articles of historical and theoretical importance.

Contents for Volume 38:Science and Technology Studies and Information Studies, by Nancy A. Van HouseNew Theoretic Approaches for Human-Computer Interaction, by Yvonne RogersCommunity and Electronic Community, by David Ellis, Rachel Oldridge, and Ana VasconcelosLatent Semantic Analysis, by Susan T. DumaisThe Use of Web Search Engines in Information Science Research, by Judit Bar-IlanWeb Mining: Machine Learning for Web Applications, by Hsinchun Chen and Michael ChauData Mining in Health and Medical Information, by Peter A. BathIndexing, Browsing, and Searching of Digital Video, by Alan F. SmeatonICT's and Political Life, by Alice Robbin, Christina Courtright, and Leah DavisLegal Aspects of the Web, by Alexandre Lopez Borrull and Charles OppenheimPreservation of Digital Objectives, by Patricia GallowayThe Internet and Unrefereed Scholarly Publishing, by Rob Kling

The National Science Foundation funded the first Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology initiative to look at systems that support collaborations in business and elsewhere. This book explores the global revolution in human interconnectedness. It will discuss the various collaborative workgroups and their use in technology. The initiative focuses on processes of coordination and cooperation among autonomous units in human systems, in computer and communication systems, and in hybrid organizations of both systems. This initiative is motivated by three scientific issues which have been the focus of separate research efforts, but which may benefit from collaborative research. The first is the effort to discover the principles underlying how people collaborate and coordinate work efficiently and productively in environments characterized by a high degree of decentralized computation and decision making. The second is to gain a better fundamental understanding of the structure and outputs of organizations, industries, and markets which incorporate sophisticated, decentralized information and communications technology as an important component of their operations. The third is to understand problems of coordination in decentralized or open computer systems.

Computer systems can only deliver benefits if functionality, users and usability are central to their design and deployment. This book encapsulates work done in the DIRC project (Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Dependability), bringing together a range of disciplinary approaches - computer science, sociology and software engineering - to produce a socio-technical systems perspective on the issues surrounding trust in technology in complex settings.