Search

The perennial issue of information value creation needs to be understood in the contemporary era of a more networked user environment enabled by information technology (IT). This mixed‐methods study investigates information value cocreation from the social informatics perspective to surface sociotechnical implications for IT design and use, since cocreation is inherently social and technology‐mediated. Specifically, the cocreation of software as an information‐intensive product is examined. Data on the cocreation of Xiaomi's MIUI firmware were collected from two sources: 49 interviews of staff and user participants and web crawling of the cocreation platform. They were analyzed with interpretive analysis, topic modeling, and social network analysis for triangulation. Findings indicate three sociotechnical information practices co‐constituted by information, IT, people, and their activities. Each practice is instrumental in rapidly and continuously converting external information into cocreated information value. The adsorption information practice attracts new and diverse external information; the absorption practice integrates external and internal information rapidly by involving users; the desorption practice allows rapid adoption of the cocreated product so that information value can be realized and demonstrated for further cocreation. Critically analyzing these practices reveals unanticipated or paradoxical issues affecting the design and use of common cocreation technology such as discussion forums.

Knowledge embodiment, taking a social informatics perspective, refers to the transformation of knowledge into a form in which its value becomes evident. Knowledge embodiment in robotic systems with artificial intelligence (AI robotic systems) actualizes the value of knowledge much more powerfully than other entities, potentially altering the connections among people or even displacing professionals. To understand the effects of knowledge embodiment in AI robotic systems on connections among people and technology, this study addresses 2 cumulative research questions: (i) What is the nature of knowledge embodiment, that is, how are knowledge and AI robots assembled for knowledge work? (ii) How does knowledge embodiment affect connections among people and technology (that is, social informatics)? A case study of a large hospital that has employed different AI robotic systems in many parts of its healthcare service provision process indicates 4 forms of knowledge embodiment, each with a distinct focus. Further, a social informatics analysis suggests four ways knowledge embodiment affects connections among people and technology and reveals related social and institutional issues that go beyond technological determinism. Implications of these findings for research on social informatics and information science are discussed.

Despite widespread enthusiasm, evidence of the effectiveness of learning analytics remains mixed. One possible explanation for this is that insufficient attention has been paid to the contexts in which it is introduced. We report here on a small-scale study into the prior use of data and communications technologies by tutors, who comprise a key user group in The Open University’s tuition model. Tutors interviewed reported using a complex set of data sources and information tools, and creating local/personal tools and methods for keeping track of students and their interactions with them.

Wikidata is evolving as the hub of Linked Open Data (LOD), with its language-neutral URIs and close adherence to Wikipedia. Well defined URIs help the data to be interoperable and linkable. This paper examines the possibilities of utilizing Wikidata as the means of a vocabulary resource for promoting the use of linkable concepts. Digital curation projects are vibrant with varying demands and purposes, which makes them less suitable for adopting any common vocabularies or ontologies. Also, developing and maintaining custom vocabularies are expensive processes for smaller projects in terms of resources and skill requirements. In general, Wikidata entities are well documented with Wikipedia entries, and Wikipedia entries express the conceptual and hierarchical relations in detail with provisions to modify or create. The authors explain the concept of using Wikidata as a vocabulary source with a proof of concept module implementation for Omeka-S, a widely adapted open source digital curation platform. This paper is expected to show some practical insights on reliable an reasonable vocabulary development for social informatics as well as cultural heritage projects, with a notion to improve the quality and quantity of linkable data from digital curation projects.

This paper presents a mobile data collection method using a 360° camera developed in an ongoing qualitative doctoral research project. The method captures audio, participant action and the running environment visuals of a situation in an immersive way compared to traditional audio‐video capture. The method contributes towards an understanding of information types, use and value amongst those who run. This paper describes the mobile method, its research context and provides an insight to how the method has contributed to developing findings about information types and use.

Part 5: Further Aspects; International audience; University departments designed for interdisciplinary fields such as social informatics inevitably have curricula covering broad disciplinary areas. Such curricula generally allow students to choose from a wide variety of electives. In this research, we developed a system that visualises selected courses by applying methodologies from the network sciences. The proposed system includes functionality supporting user visualisation as follows: (1) a filter-by-grade function that filters out nodes on student network graphs; (2) a visualisation of student attributes function that shows student attributes by colouring nodes on student network graphs; and (3) a cross-filter function that filters out nodes on two connected networks (student and course networks). We conducted an empirical study involving approximately 100 students majoring in social informatics, with visualisations analysed by curriculum designers. We found that student network visualisations indicate that the student major affects course selection and that clusters form in course network graphs, clearly illustrating course selection in an interdisciplinary curriculum.

In today’s world of digitization, information is increasing at an exponential rate due to the ubiquitous nature of social media and web sources. With the advancement in Social Signal Processing, Social Informatics & Computing, and big data mining techniques, we can use this information in the health domain to determine the trend in the spread of symptoms and risk factors of diseases temporally. In this paper, our primary focus is to study coverage and evolution of risk factors of 19 most common Cancers in the last ten years (2009–2018) from the pieces of evidence collected from Tweets (Social Signal) and Wikipedia (Web Data) and demonstrate the relevant findings. Moreover, temporal variations are also shown in coverage of each cancer and risk factors to determine their evolution over time. We try to find the answers of questions like, Do different information sources show different risk factors for the same cancer ? or Is there any visible and distinctive trend in the temporal variation of any specific cancer or its risk factors? Each of the analysis unfolds various exciting observations. The most important among these is that some risk factors have the most adverse effects according to the one information source, but they are not at all harmful according to the other. Finally, the correlation of information sources, i.e., social signals and web data, is shown concerning variation in coverage of cancers and risk factors.

This research-in-progress proposes an approach that accounts for social and institutional issues in the design and implementation of sensor networks for air-quality monitoring. The proposed approach is evaluated through action research, in an initiative that seeks to enhance the air-quality sensor network of a Megalopolis based on data analytics. Preliminary findings indicate that the proposed approach improves access to resources, enhances the validity of design, and increases buy-in for implementation.

Modern societal issues occur in a broad spectrum with very high levels of complexity and challenges, many of which are becoming increasingly difficult to address without the aid of cutting-edge technology. To alleviate these social problems, the Korean government recently announced the implementation of mega-projects to solve low employment, population aging, low birth rate and social safety net problems by utilizing AI and ICBM (IoT, Cloud Computing, Big Data, Mobile) technologies. In this letter, we will present the views on how AI and ICT technologies can be applied to ease or solve social problems by sharing examples of research results from studies of social anxiety, environmental noise, mobility of the disabled, and problems in social safety. We will also describe how all these technologies, big data, methodologies and knowledge can be combined onto an open social informatics platform.

© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The influence of Web search personalisation on professional knowledge work is an understudied area. Here we investigate how public sector officials self-assess their dependency on the Google Web search engine, whether they are aware of the potential impact of algorithmic biases on their ability to retrieve all relevant information, and how much relevant information may actually be missed due to Web search personalisation. We find that the majority of participants in our experimental study are neither aware that there is a potential problem nor do they have a strategy to mitigate the risk of missing relevant information when performing online searches. Most significantly, we provide empirical evidence that up to$$20\%$$ of relevant information may be missed due to Web search personalisation. This work has significant implications for Web research by public sector professionals, who should be provided with training about the potential algorithmic biases that may affect their judgments and decision making, as well as clear guidelines how to minimise the risk of missing relevant information.

Despite heightened interest, integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into businesses remains challenging. Recent surveys show that up to 85 % of AI initiatives ultimately fail to deliver on their promises. Studies on successful AI applications that could provide invaluable lessons for organizations embarking on their AI journey are still lacking. Therefore, this study aims to understand how AI technology, people, and processes should be managed to successfully create value. Building on the resource orchestration perspective, this study analyzes the successful applications of AI at Alibaba's e-commerce fulfillment center. The findings indicate that the key AI resources include data, AI algorithms, and robots. These resources must be orchestrated (e.g., coordinated, leveraged, deployed) to work with other related resources, such as warehouse facilities and existing information systems, to generate strong AI capabilities. The key AI capabilities generated include forecasting, planning, and learning. More importantly, AI capabilities are not independent – they interact and coevolve with human capabilities to create business value in terms of efficiency (e.g., space optimization, labor productivity) and effectiveness (e.g., error reduction). The implications of understanding these social informatics of AI for research and practice are discussed.

Big data has been widely promoted across disciplines and sectors for its potential to enhance lives and promote knowledge discovery. However, challenges arise at all stages of the data lifecycle due to the complexity of interactions between data and the contexts within which they are collected and managed, which has implications for interpretations of this data and eventual use of information and the creation of knowledge products from these data. Starting from the perspective of social informatics, this panel will discuss: the reciprocal relationships between data and context; specific challenges in distinct stages of data generation, data repository implementation, data curation, data use, and data reproducibility; and the implications of these challenges and their potential solutions for both social informatics research and society in general.

EDITOR'S SUMMARY In the modern age of the internet, computers and smartphones, we have access to incredible amounts of information. However, often what we seek from this information is knowledge, which can be expressed as raw information that has been reproduced and curated. Professor Steve Fuller discussed this divide at the 2016 ASIS&T Annual Lecture at Napier University on November 30. Fuller discusses the idea that raw information must be curated and edited in order to express actual knowledge, but in the act of reproducing the information for this purpose, data can become distorted and omitted. Fuller cites Wikileaks as a source of raw information that was handed to media outlets to edit and present as knowledge. Wikipedia is another domain that has become one of the most cited centers of knowledge, but allows anyone to curate information and remains unstudied as a whole.

Motivation: There is a paradox at the heart of informatics where practical implementation generally fails to understand the socio-technical impact of novel technologies and disruptive innovation when adopted in `real-world&rsquo, systems. This phenomenon, termed technological determinism, is manifested in a time-lag between the adoption of novel technologies and an understanding of the underlying theory which develops following research into their adoption. Methods: We consider informatics theory as it relates to: social informatics and how humans&rsquo, function in society, the relationship between society and technology, information systems, information systems design, and human&ndash, computer interactions. The challenges posed by novel technologies and disruptive innovation are considered as they relate to information systems and information systems design. Open research questions with directions for future research are discussed with an introduction to and our proposed approach to socio-technical information system design. Significance: We conclude that the adoption of disruptive innovation presents both opportunities and threats for all stakeholders in computerised systems. However, determinism is a topic requiring research to generate a suitable level of understanding and technological determinism remains a significant challenge.

In this paper we present the creation and deployment of a concerted set of Mixed Reality Technologies designed for creating engaging public experiences and enhanced storytelling opportunities focused on artefacts. Under the title of the Mixed Reality Storytelling (MXRS) project, we combined Internet of Things-inspired approaches and Virtual and Augmented Reality experience technologies, with 3D scanning content creation techniques, to create mobile and adaptable tools suitable for public engagements and industry partners, such as museums and galleries. We present 4 cases of public impact events where the tools were employed over a period of 2 years to create content from visitor contributions, which was then used in follow-on VR and AR engagements. We also demonstrate cases where the tools were used to create content for novel applications of cultural and social informatics.

Today's social informatics is facing the challenge of exponentially increasing data present online. However this massive amount of data is available across several heterogeneous platform making it a challenging task especially to comprehend useful information and effectively use it for business intelligence. Achieving Business intelligence through machine learning is one of the significant issues in recent era. Previously, outliers were being considered as noisy data and disregarded leading to loss of relevant information. This paper highlights the major research challenges in this mining sub domain. It provides a comprehensive taxonomy extracted for Business Intelligence methodologies along with current application sectors. Future research directions and suggestions have been pointed to address this anomaly gap to achieve effective business strategies

During of the first twenty-five years of its existence, the informatics course in Russian school was structured around following cross-cutting content lines: information and information processes; representation of information; computer; modeling and formalization; algorithmization and programming; Information Technology; computer telecommunications, social informatics. Recently thematic block Mathematical foundations of computer science has been more clearly formed in it. In addition traditional line of algorithmization and programming, which was transformed into the thematic block Algorithms and programming elements, which includes robotics and mathematical modeling, has developed significantly. In general content of the course of informatics is stable, its fundamental component is the basis of the state final certification of graduates of primary and senior schools. At the same time students, their parents as well as representatives of the higher education and IT industry express concern about content of the modern school informatics course, rightly believing that this discipline has much greater potential for mastering such key competences of the digital economy as basic programming, basics of working with data, communication in modern digital environments. Since 2012, Russian students successfully participate in the international distant competition Bebras, in the tasks of which priority is given to the issues of theoretical informatics as the basis of modern information technologies. The subject field of the competition is in many respects consonant with the content lines of Russian informatics course in school, the main differences lie in approaches to the representation of key concepts, ideas, methods and algorithms. Materials of the international competition Bebras can become a basis for the modernization of Russian informatics course in school by expanding its theoretical base as well as ensuring the unity of its theoretical and practical components.

In an academic field as diverse as Social Informatics, identifying current and emergent topics presents a significant challenge to individuals and institutions alike. Several approaches based on keyword assignment and visualizing co-occurrence networks have already been described with the goal of providing insight into topical and geographical clusters of publications, authors or institutions. This work identifies a few key challenges to the aforementioned methods and proposes an interdisciplinary approach based on qualitative text analysis to assign keywords to research institutions and quantitatively explore them by building interactive co-occurrence and research focus parallelship networks. The proposed technique is then applied to the field of Social Informatics by identifying more than a hundred organizations worldwide within that domain, coding them with keywords based on research group titles, online self-descriptions and affiliated publications, and creating an online tool to generate interactive co-occurrence, network neighbourhood and research focus parallelship visualizations.

Purpose– In the Web 2.0 era, more and more digital immigrants actively participate in blogging, video sharing, online rating, and micro blogging, etc. However, some may be more skilled in producing and generating online content while others still meet some barriers in doing so. Thus, it is interesting to investigate the online generative capability of digital immigrants in Web 2.0 context. This paper seeks to address this issue.Design/methodology/approach– The authors selected Shanghai as their target province in this study for its large scale of internet users. An in-depth semi-structured interview was used as their research method. They selected several community clubs as the interview settings. In addition, age was adopted as a threshold to define the Chinese digital immigrants for its convenience in sampling.Findings– Chinese digital immigrants are playing an important role in content generating, and have a great potential in the future contribution, and a number of digital immigrants regard the content generating as a pretty easy work while some others felt difficulties, even frustrated and exhausted when generating content. About the content type, digital immigrants prefer to generate that content with low granularity. About the motivation, the intrinsic motivation and the extrinsic motivation with an internalized focus play a dominant role. About the generating mode, digital immigrants prefer to generate content individually or collectively.Originality/value– This paper develops the concept of online generative capability by adapting the notion of generativity from other disciplines to the characteristics of Web 2.0. Then an integrated conceptual framework is built and evaluated. Practically, the paper puts forward some implications for the designers, managers, and information service staff from different perspectives to facilitate the digital immigrant's online generative capability.

While social informatics (SI) is uniquely positioned to examine the technical and organizational properties of information and communication technology (ICT) and associated user practices, it often ignores the cultural mediation of design, use, and meaning of ICTs. Critical informatics, more so than normative and analytic orientations to ICT, offers possibilities to foreground culture as a sensitizing context for studying information and technology in society. This paper articulates a new critical informatics approach: critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) as an analysis employing critical cultural frameworks (e.g. critical race or feminist theory) to jointly interrogate culture and technology. CTDA (Brock 2009) is a bifurcated approach for studying Internet phenomena integrating interface analysis with user discourse analysis. This paper outlines CTDA, providing examples of how its methodological flexibility applies to examining varied ICT artifacts, such as twitter and search engine phenomena, while maintaining a critical perspective on design and use. CTDA is an important tool for critical informaticists that contributes to building understanding of technology as culture, grounded in user perspectives and real-world practices.

The current trend in the European Union (EU) is to support the development of online dispute resolution (ODR) that saves financial and human resources. Therefore, research articles mainly deal with the design of new ODR solutions, without researching the social aspects of using different kinds of ODR solutions. For this reason, the main aim of the article is an empirical evaluation of two kinds of ODR solutions in business-to-business (B2B) relationships from the perspective of a selected social category. The article focuses on: (1) comparing unassisted and smart assisted negotiation while using the artificial intelligence approach, (2) the satisfaction and attitudes of Generation Y members from the Czech and Slovak Republic towards different ways of negotiating. The conclusions of this study can help researchers to design or improve existing ODR solutions, and companies to choose the most suitable managers from Generation Y for B2B negotiation. The results show that Generation Y members prefer computer-mediated communication as compared to face to face negotiation, the participants were more satisfied with the negotiation process when using smart assisted negotiation. Through a computer-mediated negotiation, even sellers with lower emotional stability can maintain an advantageous position. Similarly, buyers with lower agreeableness or higher extraversion can negotiate more favorable terms and offset their loss.

Social networks like Twitter are increasingly important in the creation of new ways of communication. They have also become useful tools for social and linguistic research due to the massive amounts of public textual data available. This is particularly important for less resourced languages, as it allows to apply current natural language processing techniques to large amounts of unstructured data. In this work, we study the linguistic and social aspects of young and adult people&rsquo, s behaviour based on their tweets&rsquo, contents and the social relations that arise from them. With this objective in mind, we have gathered over 10 million tweets from more than 8000 users. First, we classified each user in terms of its life stage (young/adult) according to the writing style of their tweets. Second, we applied topic modelling techniques to the personal tweets to find the most popular topics according to life stages. Third, we established the relations and communities that emerge based on the retweets. We conclude that using large amounts of unstructured data provided by Twitter facilitates social research using computational techniques such as natural language processing, giving the opportunity both to segment communities based on demographic characteristics and to discover how they interact or relate to them.

This article discusses social Informatics in preparing students for life and work in the information society В данной статье рассмотрена социальная информатика в подготовке студентов к жизни и деятельности в условиях информационного общества

The Internet Engineering Task Force is an open organization that produces Internet Standards. In this paper we look at Twitter and IETF mailing lists to answer questions on IETF participation and social media usage and IETF reaction to societal events: Are Internet Standards discussed on Twitter? Who is involved in the process? Do external events like Snowden revelations in 2013 correlate with related IETF activities? To answer this, we look in particular at security-related activities at the IETF like in the TLS working group. With respect to the Snowden leaks, we quantify the impact in terms of increase in activity and contributors in related areas.

Ontology development is considered to be a useful approach to the design and implementation of interoperable systems. This literature review and commentary examines the current state of knowledge in this field with particular reference to processes involved in assuring epistemological adequacy. It takes the perspective of the information systems practitioner keen to adopt a systematic approach to in-house ontology design, taking into consideration previously published work. The study arises from author involvement in an integration/interoperability project on systems that support Scottish Common Housing Registers in which, ultimately, ontological modelling was not deployed. Issues concerning the agreement of meaning, and the implications for the creation of interoperable systems, are discussed. The extent to which those theories, methods and frameworks provide practitioners with a usable set of tools is explored, and examples of practical applications of ontological modelling are noted. The findings from the review of the literature demonstrate a number of difficulties faced by information systems practitioners keen to develop and deploy domain ontologies. A major problem is deciding which broad approach to take: to rely on automatic ontology construction techniques, or to rely on keywords and domain experts to develop ontologies.

Information technology (IT) provides resources with which human actors can change the patterns of social action in which they participate. Studies of genre change have been among those that have focused on such change. Those studies, though, have tended not to focus on creative genres. This study is one in a series of studies meant to examine IT use in literature and the arts. The current study mediates between smaller, qualitative studies and future, quantitative studies with larger sample sizes. The results demonstrate that the conceptual framework developed in earlier studies is essentially valid, but needs to be modified for future studies. The pilot survey approach paid off both in modifications to the conceptual framework under development and in refinement of the research questions for future iterations. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Early social informatics research focused primarily on ethnographic and site-specific observations or was based on limited discourse analysis involving smaller case studies. However, in the last decade, the rise of social media has provided access to large-scale data and made the observation of interaction between people and technologies easier. This trend has informed social informatics perspectives for examining the roles and impacts of social media in our work and social lives. For a number of years now, researchers in social informatics have been concerned about expanding the theoretical depth and richness of the discipline (Sanfilippo and Fichman, 2014; Sawyer and Tyworth, 2006). As studies of social media continue to gain in popularity and move from descriptive to more analytical approaches, researchers are likely to begin to critically reflect on what they are doing and finding and to therefore provide insights into theoretical aspects of social informatics research.