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Department of Informatics

Books We Have Written

[book-listing][book-title]Queer Game Studies[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw
2017[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
The in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays in Queer Game Studies use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. This volume reveals the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games, demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world and establishing an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture.
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[book-listing][book-title]Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Hamid R. Ekbia and Bonnie A. Nardi
2017[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what prompts people to participate in the process.
Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.
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[book-listing][book-title]The Stuff of Bits[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Paul Dourish
2017[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Virtual entities that populate our digital experience, like e-books, virtual worlds, and online stores, are backed by the large-scale physical infrastructures of server farms, fiber optic cables, power plants, and microwave links. But another domain of material constraints also shapes digital living: the digital representations sketched on whiteboards, encoded into software, stored in databases, loaded into computer memory, and transmitted on networks. These digital representations encode aspects of our everyday world and make them available for digital processing. The limits and capacities of those representations carry significant consequences for digital society.

In The Stuff of Bits, Paul Dourish examines the specific materialities that certain digital objects exhibit. He presents four case studies: emulation, the creation of a “virtual” computer inside another; digital spreadsheets and their role in organizational practice; relational databases and the issue of “the databaseable”; and the evolution of digital networking and the representational entailments of network protocols. These case studies demonstrate how a materialist account can offer an entry point to broader concerns—questions of power, policy, and polity in the realm of the digital.
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[book-listing][book-title]Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Marian Petre and André van der Hoek
2016[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
What makes an expert software designer? It is more than experience or innate ability. Expert software designers have specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles that they apply deliberately during their design work. This book offers sixty-six insights, distilled from years of studying experts at work, that capture what successful software designers actually do to create great software.

The book presents these insights in a series of two-page illustrated spreads, with the principle and a short explanatory text on one page, and a drawing on the facing page. For example, “Experts generate alternatives” is illustrated by the same few balloons turned into a set of very different balloon animals. The text is engaging and accessible; the drawings are thought-provoking and often playful.
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[book-listing][book-title]Boundary Objects and Beyond[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke and Ellen Balka
2016[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed the social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in classification systems. Star’s most celebrated concept was the notion of boundary objects: representational forms—things or theories—that can be shared between different communities, with each holding its own understanding of the representation.

Unfortunately, Leigh was unable to complete a work on the poetics of infrastructure that further developed the full range of her work. This volume collects articles by Star that set out some of her thinking on boundary objects, marginality, and infrastructure, together with essays by friends and colleagues from a range of disciplines—from philosophy of science to organization science—that testify to the wide-ranging influence of Star’s work.
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[book-listing]Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics[book-title]Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics [/book-title]
[book-subtitle]by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, danah boyd
2015[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
In the last two decades, both the conception and the practice of participatory culture have been transformed by the new affordances enabled by digital, networked, and mobile technologies. This exciting new book explores that transformation by bringing together three leading figures in conversation. Jenkins, Ito and boyd examine the ways in which our personal and professional lives are shaped by experiences interacting with and around emerging media.

Stressing the social and cultural contexts of participation, the authors describe the process of diversification and mainstreaming that has transformed participatory culture. They advocate a move beyond individualized personal expression and argue for an ethos of “doing it together” in addition to “doing it yourself.”

Participatory Culture in a Networked Era will interest students and scholars of digital media and their impact on society and will engage readers in a broader dialogue and conversation about their own participatory practices in this digital age.
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[book-listing]Multitasking in the Digital Age by Gloria Mark[book-title]Multitasking in the Digital Age[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Gloria Mark
2015[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
In our digital age we can communicate, access, create, and share an abundance of information effortlessly, rapidly, and nearly ubiquitously. The consequence of having so many choices is that they compete for our attention: we continually switch our attention between different types of information while doing different types of tasks; in other words, we multitask. The activity of information workers in particular is characterized by the continual switching of attention throughout the day. In this book, empirical work is presented, based on ethnographic and sensor data collection, which reveals how multitasking affects information workers’ activities, mood, and stress in real work environments. Multitasking is discussed from various perspectives: activity switching, interruptions as triggers for activity switching, email as a major source of interruptions, and the converse of distractions: focused attention. All of these factors are components of information work. This book begins by defining multitasking and describing different research approaches used in studying multitasking. It then describes how multiple factors occur to encourage multitasking in the digitally-enabled workplace: the abundance and ease of accessing information, the number of different working spheres, the workplace environment, attentional state, habit, and social norms. Empirical work is presented describing the nature of multitasking, the relationship of different types of interruptions and email with overload and stress, and patterns of attention focus. The final chapter ties these factors together and discusses challenges that information workers in our digital age face.
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[book-listing]The Interconnections Collection[book-title]The Interconnections Collection:
–Short Circuits. Crafting e-Puppets with DIY Electronics
–Soft Circuits. Crafting e-Fashion with DIY Electronics
–Gaming the System. Designing with Gamestar Mechanic
–Script Changers. Digital Storytelling with Scratch[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Melissa Gresalfi, Kylie Peppler, and Rafi Santo
2014[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
In an era of increasing interconnectedness, knowledge — and power — belongs to those who understand the nature of the interdependent systems that organize the world — and have the skills to change those systems. The books in the Interconnections collection offer K-12 educators a curriculum toolkit for supporting systems thinking with a design-based approach to learning that aligns with current Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards while still being relevant to youth interests in digital culture.

Each book teaches systems thinking concepts and skills in the context of a specific digital media platform and includes an average of six design challenges or learning projects. This innovative, design-based approach is useful for both in- and out-of-school settings, and was developed collaboratively by designers and educators from Indiana University’s Creativity Labs, Institute of Play, the Digital Youth Network, and the National Writing Project.
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[book-listing]Tanenbaum-NonverbalCommunication[book-title]Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Joshua Tanenbaum, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Michael Nixon
2014[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Over the last 20 years there has been an expansion of network mediated social activities, and an accompanying explosion of research interest into the poetics of networked communication. Of particular interest is the rise of what have come to be known as “virtual worlds”: persistent graphical environments populated (and often partially authored) by large communities of individual users. Interactors in these worlds are embodied as avatars: digital puppets or representations through which the user exerts his or her will on the environment. It is this virtual embodiment that makes today’s virtual worlds so interesting. With virtual embodiment comes a host of new and important communicative possibilities, and an assortment of new challenges and literacies including a wide range of nonverbal communication behaviors and non-linguistic social signaling options.

In this book, we begin the work of articulating the challenges and possibilities for non-verbal communication in virtual worlds. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, we consider the past, present, and future of human communication online.
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[book-listing]Lopes-ExercisesInProgrammingStyle[book-title]Exercises in Programming Style[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Cristina Videira Lopes
2014[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Using a simple computational task (term frequency) to illustrate different programming styles, Exercises in Programming Style helps readers understand the various ways of writing programs and designing systems. It is designed to be used in conjunction with code provided on an online repository. The book complements and explains the raw code in a way that is accessible to anyone who regularly practices the art of programming. The book can also be used in advanced programming courses in computer science and software engineering programs.

The book contains 33 different styles for writing the term frequency task. The styles are grouped into nine categories: historical, basic, function composition, objects and object interactions, reflection and metaprogramming, adversity, data-centric, concurrency, and interactivity. The author verbalizes the constraints in each style and explains the example programs. Each chapter first presents the constraints of the style, next shows an example program, and then gives a detailed explanation of the code. Most chapters also have sections focusing on the use of the style in systems design as well as sections describing the historical context in which the programming style emerged.
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[book-listing]Olson-WaysOfKnowingInHCI[book-title]Ways of Knowing in HCI[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Judith S. Olson and Wendy A. Kellogg
2014[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
This textbook brings together both new and traditional research methods in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Research methods include interviews and observations, ethnography, grounded theory and analysis of digital traces of behavior. The background context, clear explanations, and sample exercises make this an ideal textbook for graduate students.

Chapters are consistently structured to describe the research methods and their applications, including what they are useful for, what they are not appropriate for, and the key ingredients needed before using a method. Each chapter provides:

·         A short description of the method
·         Its history and evolution
·         The questions it can answer
·         Guidelines to ensure quality work
·         References for increasing expertise
·         References to examples of successful application
·         Exercises suitable for further student exploration

The chapters, written by foremost experts in the field, are highly diverse.  They range from grounded theory and action research to retrospective analysis, agent-based modeling, and social network analysis. Several chapters focus on system building, such as technical research, building an experimental online community, and field deployments, while others focus on design research. Experiments and surveys are covered, including their potential to benefit from crowdsourcing. New sources of digital data sensory systems, eye tracking, and log analysis are discussed. Because many of these methods extend to the world of online activity, the book concludes by exploring the ethical challenges that have surfaced.

Ways of Knowing in HCI provides a starting point toward other avenues for continued learning. Readers will gain an understanding of the type of knowledge each method provides, its disciplinary roots, and how each contributes to understanding users, user behavior, and the context of use. The book is an invaluable resource for students, researchers and  professionals alike.
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[book-listing]WorkingTogetherApart-JudithOlson-GaryOlson[book-title]Working Together Apart: Collaboration over the Internet[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Judith S. Olson and Gary M. Olson
2014[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Increasingly, teams are working together when they are not in the same location, even though there are many challenges to doing so successfully. Here we review the latest insights into these matters, guided by a framework that we have developed during two decades of research on this topic.
This framework organizes a series of factors that we have found to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful distributed collaborations. We then review the kinds of technology options that are available today, focusing more on types of technologies rather than specific instances. We describe a database of geographically distributed projects we have studied and introduce the Collaboration Success Wizard, an online tool for assessing past, present, or planned distributed collaborations. We close with a set of recommendations for individuals, managers, and those higher in the organizations who wish to support distance work.
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[book-listing]Kobsa-PersonalizedDigitalTelevision[book-title]Personalized Digital Television: Targeting Programs to Individual Viewers (Human-Computer Interaction Series) (Volume 6)[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Liliana Ardissono (Editor), Alfred Kobsa (Editor), Mark T. Maybury
2013[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
TV viewers today are exposed to overwhelming amounts of information, and challenged by the plethora of interactive functionality provided by current set-top boxes. To ensure broad adoption of this technology by consumers, future Digital Television will have to take usability issues thoroughly into account. In particular, serious attention must be paid to facilitate the selection of content on an individual basis, and to provide easy-to-use interfaces that satisfy viewers’ interaction requirements.

This volume collects selected research reports on the development of personalized services for Interactive TV. Drawing upon contributions from academia and industry in the US, Europe and Asia, this book represents a comprehensive picture of leading edge research in personalized television.
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[book-listing]book1[book-title]Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Marian Petre, André van der Hoek
2013[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work examines how developers actually perform software design in their day-to-day work. The book offers a comprehensive look at early software design, exploring the work of professional designers from a range of different viewpoints. Divided into four sections, it discusses various theoretical examinations of the nature of software design and particular design problems, critically assesses the processes and practices that designers follow, presents in-depth accounts of key supporting elements of design, and explores the role of human interaction in software design.
Features:
-Present in depth, human focused perspective on software design
-Explores what software designers actually do (rather than what they should do) through video analyses of them working on a design problem
-Highlights positive and negative patterns and practices
-Identifies a research agenda for the future to support existing designers in their work and train newcomers to become effective designers
-Includes contributions from expert practitioners in human-computer interaction, psychology, software design, and product design.
“As professional developers of software-intensive systems, we seek to craft artifacts that are useful, yet by their very nature, are also fiercely complex. Beauty and elegance of design are the elements we employ to balance that complexity. This book brilliantly attends to the landscape of how we may best design such systems.”
-Grady Booch, Fellow, IBM Research
“… an important contribution to design research and lays broader foundations for further research for many years to come.”
-From the Foreword by Nigel Cross, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies, The Open University
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[book-listing]Hayes-InteractiveTechnologiesforAutism[book-title]Interactive Technologies for Autism (Synthesis Lectures on Assistive, Rehabilitative, and Health-Preserving Technologies)[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Julie A. Kientz , Matthew S. Goodwin, Gillian R. Hayes, and Gregory D. Abowd
2013[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Development, deployment, and evaluation of interactive technologies for individuals with autism have been rapidly increasing over the last decade. There is great promise for the use of these types of technologies to enrich interventions, facilitate communication, and support data collection. Emerging technologies in this area also have the potential to enhance assessment and diagnosis of individuals with autism, to understand the nature of autism, and to help researchers conduct basic and applied research. This book provides an in-depth review of the historical and state-of-the-art use of technology by and for individuals with autism. The intention is to give readers a comprehensive background in order to understand what has been done and what promises and challenges lie ahead. By providing a classification scheme and general review, this book can also help technology designers and researchers better understand what technologies have been successful, what problems remain open, and where innovations can further address challenges and opportunities for individuals with autism and the variety of stakeholders connected to them.
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[book-listing]Kobsa-AdaptiveHypertextandHypermedia[book-title]Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Peter Brusilovski (Editor), Alfred Kobsa (Editor), Julita Vassileva (Editor)
2013[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Hypertext/hypermedia systems and user-model-based adaptive systems in the areas of learning and information retrieval have for a long time been considered as two mutually exclusive approaches to information access. Adaptive systems tailor information to the user and may guide the user in the information space to present the most relevant material, taking into account a model of the user’s goals, interests and preferences. Hypermedia systems, on the other hand, are `user neutral’: they provide the user with the tools and the freedom to explore an information space by browsing through a complex network of information nodes. Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia systems attempt to bridge the gap between these two approaches.

Adaptation of hypermedia systems to each individual user is increasingly needed. With the growing size, complexity and heterogeneity of current hypermedia systems, such as the World Wide Web, it becomes virtually impossible to impose guidelines on authors concerning the overall organization of hypermedia information. The networks therefore become so complex and unstructured that the existing navigational tools are no longer powerful enough to provide orientation on where to search for the needed information. It is also not possible to identify appropriate pre-defined paths or subnets for users with certain goals and knowledge backgrounds since the user community of hypermedia systems is usually quite inhomogeneous. This is particularly true for Web-based applications which are expected to be used by a much greater variety of users than any earlier standalone application.

A possible remedy for the negative effects of the traditional `one-size-fits-all’ approach in the development of hypermedia systems is to equip them with the ability to adapt to the needs of the individual users. A possible way of achieving adaptivity is by modeling the users and tailoring the system’s interactions to their goals, tasks and interests. In this sense, the notion of adaptive hypertext/hypermedia comes naturally to denote a hypertext or hypermedia system, which reflects some features of the user and/or characteristics of his system usage in a user model, and utilizes this model in order to adapt various behavioral aspects of the system to the user.

This book is the first comprehensive publication on adaptive hypertext and hypermedia. It is oriented towards researchers and practitioners in the fields of hypertext and hypermedia, information systems, and personalized systems. It is also an important resource for the numerous developers of Web-based applications. The design decisions, adaptation methods, and experience presented in this book are a unique source of ideas and techniques for developing more usable and more intelligent Web-based systems suitable for a great variety of users. The practitioners will find it important that many of the adaptation techniques presented in this book have proved to be efficient and are ready to be used in various applications.
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[book-listing][book-title]Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Constance Steinkuehler,‎ Kurt Squire,‎ Sasha Barab
2012[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
This volume is the first reader on videogames and learning of its kind. Covering game design, game culture, and games as 21st century pedagogy, it demonstrates the depth and breadth of scholarship on games and learning to date. The chapters represent some of the most influential thinkers, designers, and writers in the emerging field of games and learning – including James Paul Gee, Soren Johnson, Eric Klopfer, Colleen Macklin, Thomas Malaby, Bonnie Nardi, David Sirlin, and others. Together, their work functions both as an excellent introduction to the field of games and learning and as a powerful argument for the use of games in formal and informal learning environments in a digital age.
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[book-listing]book1[book-title]Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, T. L. Taylor
2012[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Ethnography and Virtual Worlds is the only book of its kind–a concise, comprehensive, and practical guide for students, teachers, designers, and scholars interested in using ethnographic methods to study online virtual worlds, including both game and nongame environments. Written by leading ethnographers of virtual worlds, and focusing on the key method of participant observation, the book provides invaluable advice, tips, guidelines, and principles to aid researchers through every stage of a project, from choosing an online fieldsite to writing and publishing the results.
-Provides practical and detailed techniques for ethnographic research customized to reflect the specific issues of online virtual worlds, both game and nongame
-Draws on research in a range of virtual worlds, including Everquest, Second Life, There.com, and World of Warcraft
-Provides suggestions for dealing with institutional review boards, human subjects protocols, and ethical issues
-Guides the reader through the full trajectory of ethnographic research, from research design to data collection, data analysis, and writing up and publishing research results
-Addresses myths and misunderstandings about ethnographic research, and argues for the scientific value of ethnography
“What does ‘being there to know there’ mean in the virtual world? ‘Not much,’ I used to think! Maybe ‘virtual ethnography’ was an oxymoron? This book changed my mind. Most surprising is how the authors’ distillation of ethnography for virtual worlds reveals its essential and classical features. This book renews the craft of ethnography for all of the social sciences in virtual and physical worlds alike, making us think differently about both.”–Paul Willis, author of Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs
“This might be the best thing I have ever read about ethnography. I love this book.”–Lori Kendall, author of Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub
“Written by a very authoritative team, this is a distinctive guide, rich in practical advice grounded in the authors’ experiences.”–Christine Hine, author of Virtual Ethnography
Tom Boellstorff is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Bonnie Nardi is professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. Celia Pearce is associate professor of digital media at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her books include Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. T. L. Taylor is associate professor of comparative media studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her books include Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture.
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[book-listing]book1[book-title]Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, Izumi Tsuji
2012[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
“This is the first comprehensive book to examine the full range of practices we associate with Otaku culture. The range of material covered here – from train watchers to cosplayers, from model builders to fansubbers – is really spectacular, helping us to move beyond encrusted stereotypes of the isolated Otaku to a much more nuanced understanding of the Otaku subculture.”
—Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
“This strongly original book, organized by a scholar of international stature, brings together a fascinating range of experts in a highly productive dialogue about one of the most interesting popular culture phenomena of the last fifty years.”
—Ellen Seiter. Stephen K. Nenno Chair of Television Studies and Professor of Critical Studies, USC School of Cinematic Arts
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[book-listing]book1[book-title]Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Paul M. Leonardi, Bonnie A. Nardi, Jannis Kallinikos
2012[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Ask a person on the street whether new technologies bring about important social change and you are likely to hear a resounding “yes.” But the answer is less definitive amongst academics who study technology and social practice. Scholarly writing has been heavily influenced by the ideology of technological determinism – the belief that some types or technologically driven social changes are inevitable and cannot be stopped. Rather than argue for or against notions of determinism, the authors in this book ask how the materiality (the arrangement of physical, digital, or rhetorical materials into particular forms that endure across differences in place and time) of technologies, ranging from computer-simulation tools and social media, to ranking devices and rumors, is actually implicated in the process of formal and informal organizing. The book builds a new theoretical framework to consider the important socio-technical changes confronting people’s everyday experiences in and outside of work. Leading scholars in the field contribute original chapters examining the complex interactions between technology and the social, between artifact and humans. The discussion spans multiple disciplines, including management, information systems, informatics, communication, sociology, and the history of technology, and opens up a new area of research regarding the relationship between materiality and organizing.
“Materiality and Organizing marks a long overdue turning point in the scholarly study of the human-technology relationship that now engulfs our lives. For too long, researchers have tended to treat technology as a dream conjured by agents and imbued with their projects. This brilliant sequence of essays restores and deepens the entire field of perception. It finally returns us to the facticity of technology as it persistently redefines the horizon of the possible. These tightly argued masterpieces reestablish technology as embodied and significant. Most importantly, they return us to materiality just in time. With each passing day, technology becomes both more abstracted from its physical manifestations and more ubiquitous, producing a dematerialized materiality. Only a relentless focus on this paradox will yield the intellectual tools that are required to participate in our own destinies.”
-Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor, Harvard Business School
“This volume is a much-needed exploration of the material aspects of the technologies that have reshaped our world. For two decades, a narrative framing technologies as social constructions has led to important advances in our understanding of their nature and impacts. Materiality and Organizing provides an important counterbalance to this approach in its exploration of the dimensions of materiality that constrain but also enable technologies to connect with and affect people, organizations, and society. This volume is required reading for scholars interested in technology, its development, and its impacts. Its insights into information technology are particularly significant.”
-Professor Marshall Scott Poole, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“For too long the materiality of social life has been ignored by sociologists and organization studies scholars. The role of materiality in social life is turning out to be one of the most interesting and difficult issues in the field. This multidisciplinary collection does not offer a single solution but offers the latest thoughts of scholars who try and take materiality seriously in their own research. The resulting volume is a deep and fascinating collection of essays.”
-Professor Trevor Pinch, Cornell University
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[book-listing][book-title]Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age (Technology, Education–Connections)[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Kurt Squire
2011[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Can we learn socially and academically valuable concepts and skills from video games? How can we best teach the ”gamer generation?” This accessible book describes how educators and curriculum designers can harness the participatory nature of digital media and play. The author presents a comprehensive model of games and learning that integrates analysis of games, games cultures, and educational game design. Building on over 10 years of research, Kurt Squire tells the story of the emerging field of immersive digitally mediated learning environments (or games) and outlines the future of education.
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[book-listing]Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing[book-title]Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Paul Dourish, Genevieve Bell
2011[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
“This is an exciting, intellectually crackling critique of the influential paradigm of ubiquitous computing. It restraints the taking for granted of the present in the ethos of future-oriented IT labs by showing the future to be already embedded in the everyday experiences and practices of diverse cultural and social lives. Ethnography is the authors’ chosen means, and in their wonderfully eclectic readings and impressive record of creative research, they show, topic by topic, how much of ubicomp is and will be shaped by designs for living.”
-George Marcus, Director, Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine
“Most books on ubiquitous computing do little to examine fundamental cultural categories like domesticity, privacy, ownership, and order, even if — as Dourish and Bell argue — infrastructure is inherently cultural as well as material. In a theoretically wide-ranging book filled with interesting case studies of ‘messiness’ from around the globe, as well as from the recent history of computing, they make a compelling case that science and technology studies and ethnography should play a more important role in the field of computing and the development of new mobile and embedded technologies.”
-Elizabeth Losh, Director, Culture, Art and Technology Program, University of California, San Diego.
“Beautifully written and ubiquitously grounded in scholarship, this landmark book will open horizons for all interested in the way information technology works today, and how to design a better world from the infrastructure up.”
-Geoffrey Bowker, Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburgh[/book-paragraph]
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[book-listing]Quest to Learn[book-title]Quest to Learn: Growing the School for Digital Kids[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Robert Torres, Loretta Wolozin, Rebecca Rufo-Tepper and Arana Shapiro
2010[/book-subtitle][book-paragraph]
Quest to Learn, an innovative school for grades 6 to 12 in New York City, grew out of the idea that gaming and game design offer a promising new paradigm for curriculum and learning. The designers of Quest to Learn developed an approach to learning that draws from what games do best: drop kids into inquiry-based, complex problem spaces that are built to help players understand how they are doing, what they need to work on, and where to go next. Content is not treated as dry information but as a living resource; students are encouraged to interact with the larger world in ways that feel relevant, exciting, and empowering. Quest to Learn opened in the fall of 2009 with 76 sixth graders. In their first semester, these students learned—among other things—to convert fractions into decimals in order to break a piece of code found in a library book; to use atlases and read maps to create a location guide for a reality television series; and to create video tutorials for a hapless group of fictional inventors. This research and development document outlines the learning framework for the school, making the original design available to others in the field. Elements in development include a detailed curriculum map, a budget, and samples of student and teacher handbooks.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Greening through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Bill Tomlinson
2010[/book-subtitle][book-paragraph]
“Greening through IT provides timely insights into the fusion underway between those within the environmental and policy fields, focused on sustainable development, and those in IT with the interest and training to harness all manner of information technology in pursuit of sustainability. Tomlinson explores many examples and uses a cogent narrative to demonstrate that the fusion is emerging, albeit, with far too little recognition and appreciation. This book makes good reading for techno-skeptics who undervalue the contributions IT has and is continuing to make and for techno-optimists who will learn through this comprehensive treatment how far the fusion has come.”
-Daniel A. Mazmanian, Bedrosian Chair in Governance and environmental policy scholar, The School of Policy, Planning, and Development, University of Southern California, coeditor of Toward Sustainable Communities
“I strongly recommend Greening through IT. This is a timely and extremely valuable book that covers the environmental systems. When about 60% of the world population is currently facing malnutrition and when it is projected that in 30 to 40 years oil reserves will be depleted, this will have a major impact on food production and other environmental problems worldwide.”
-David Pimentel, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University
“Green is the new digital. IT is the macroscope needed to understand it. What feels counterintuitive at the beginning of this book is obvious by the end.”
-Nicholas Negroponte, Founding Chairman Emeritus, MIT Media Lab, Founder and Chairman, One Laptop per Child
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Richard Taylor, Nenad Medvidovic, and Eric Dashofy
2010[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Why is the World Wide Web so successful? What has enabled it to scale across millions of servers and untold users? How can a company leverage its corporate knowledge to produce economically a family of software products that dominate a market segment? At the core of the answers to these questions is software architecture, the set of principal design decisions made about a system. This text reveals the fundamentals of software architecture, and enables the reader to employ the latest techniques to produce software applications that have conceptual integrity and meet all the stakeholders’ expectations.
Incorporating the latest research results, this book:
-Shows how proper focus on software architecture transforms the software development process.
-Teaches how to design the architecture of a system, including techniques appropriate for established application areas for which abundant experience exists.
-Presents methods for designing systems to meet non-functional requirements.
-Focuses on developing implementations that are faithful to their architecture, and which are adaptable to meet future needs.
-Contains numerous examples from practice.
-Surveys and analyzes numerous modeling techniques, standards, and practices
Written by internationally renowned experts with both industry and academic experience, this book’s ambitious scope makes it a suitable and unique reference for software engineering and software-architectures students, researchers, and practitioners alike.
-Richard N. Taylor is a Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1980. Professor Taylor is the Director of the Institute for Software Research, which is dedicated to fostering innovative basic and applied research in software and information technologies through partnerships with industry and government.
-Nenad Medvidović is Director of the University of California Center for Systems and Software Engineering, and an Associate professor in the Computer Science Department at USC. Medvidović received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the Department of Informatics and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. Medvidović is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER awarded (2000), the Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2005), and the IBM Real-Time Innovation Award (2007).
-Eric M. Dashofy is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA. He received his Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of California, Irvine. He is the lead developer of the ArchStudio architecture-centric software development environment, an open-source, Eclipse-bases toolset for modeling, visualizing analyzing, and implementing architecture-based software systems.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]Kobsa-ComputationalModelsofMixedInitiativeInteraction[book-title]Computational Models of Mixed-Initiative Interaction[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Susan Haller (Editor), Susan McRoy (Editor), Alfred Kobsa (Editor)
2010[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Computational Models of Mixed-Initiative Interaction brings together research that spans several disciplines related to artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning, planning, and computer-aided instruction, to account for the role that mixed initiative plays in the design of intelligent systems. The ten contributions address the single issue of how control of an interaction should be managed when abilities needed to solve a problem are distributed among collaborating agents.

Managing control of an interaction among humans and computers to gather and assemble knowledge and expertise is a major challenge that must be met to develop machines that effectively collaborate with humans. This is the first collection to specifically address this issue.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]Collaborative Software Engineering[book-title]Collaborative Software Engineering[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Ivan Mistrik, John Grundy, André van der Hoek, Jim Whitehead
2010[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Collaboration among individuals – from users to developers – is central to modern software engineering. It takes many forms: joint activity to solve common problems, negotiation to resolve conflicts, creation of shared definitions, and both social and technical perspectives impacting all software development activity. The difficulties of collaboration are also well documented. The grand challenge is not only to ensure that developers in a team deliver effectively as individuals, but that the whole team delivers more than just the sum of its parts.
The editors of this book have assembled an impressive selection of authors, who have contributed to an authoritative body of work tackling a wide range of issues in the field of collaborative software engineering. The resulting volume is divided into four parts, preceded by a general editorial chapter providing a more detailed review of the domain of collaborative software engineering. Part 1 is on “Characterizing Collaborative Software Engineering”, Part 2 examines various “Tools and Techniques”, Part 3 addresses organizational issues, and finally Part 4 contains four examples of “Emerging Issues in Collaborative Software Engineering”.
As a result, this book delivers a comprehensive state-of-the-art overview and empirical results for researchers in academia and industry in areas like software process management, empirical software engineering, and global software development. Practitioners working in this area will also appreciate the detailed descriptions and reports, which can often be used as guidelines to improve their daily work.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Mizuko Ito
2010[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Conventional wisdom about young people’s use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today’s teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth’s social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States.

Integrating twenty-three different case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.

This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of ‘World of Warcraft’[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Bonnie A. Nardi
2010[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
World of Warcraft rapidly became one of the most popular online world games on the planet, amassing 11.5 million subscribers—officially making it an online community of gamers that had more inhabitants than the state of Ohio and was almost twice as populous as Scotland. It’s a massively multiplayer online game, or MMO in gamer jargon, where each person controls a single character inside a virtual world, interacting with other people’s characters and computer-controlled monsters, quest-givers, and merchants.

In My Life as a Night Elf Priest, Bonnie Nardi, a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on how theories of what we do intersect with how we adopt and use technology, compiles more than three years of participatory research in Warcraft play and culture in the United States and China into this field study of player behavior and activity. She introduces us to her research strategy and the history, structure, and culture of Warcraft; argues for applying activity theory and theories of aesthetic experience to the study of gaming and play; and educates us on issues of gender, culture, and addiction as part of the play experience. Nardi paints a compelling portrait of what drives online gamers both in this country and in China, where she spent a month studying players in Internet cafes.

Bonnie Nardi has given us a fresh look not only at World of Warcraft but at the field of game studies as a whole. One of the first in-depth studies of a game that has become an icon of digital culture, My Life as a Night Elf Priest will capture the interest of both the gamer and the ethnographer.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Mizuko Ito
2009[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Today, computers are part of kids’ everyday lives, used both for play and for learning. We envy children’s natural affinity for computers, the ease with which they click in and out of digital worlds. Thirty years ago, however, the computer belonged almost exclusively to business, the military, and academia. In Engineering Play, Mizuko Ito describes the transformation of the computer from a tool associated with adults and work to one linked to children, learning, and play. Ito gives an account of a pivotal period in the 1980s and 1990s, which saw the rise of a new category of consumer software designed specifically for elementary school aged children. “Edutainment” software sought to blend various educational philosophies with interactive gaming and entertainment, and included such titles as Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, KidPix, and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?.

Drawing from observations of kids’ play, interviews with software developers, and advertising and industry materials, Ito identifies three educational philosophies and genres in children’s software that connect players in software production, distribution, and consumption: instruction, focused on transmission of academic content; exploration, tied to open-ended play; and construction, aimed at empowering young users to create and manipulate digital media.

The children’s software boom (and the bust that followed), says Ito, can be seen as a microcosm of the negotiations surrounding new technology, children, and education. The story she tells is both a testimonial to the transformative power of innovation and a cautionary tale about its limitations.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Scientific Collaboration on the Internet[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Gary M. Olson, Ann Zimmerman, Nathan Bos
2008[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Modern science is increasingly collaborative, as signaled by rising numbers of coauthored papers, papers with international coauthors, and multi-investigator grants. Historically, scientific collaborations were carried out by scientists in the same physical location—the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, for example, involved thousands of scientists gathered on a remote plateau in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Today, information and communication technologies allow cooperation among scientists from far-flung institutions and different disciplines. Scientific Collaboration on the Internet provides both broad and in-depth views of how new technology is enabling novel kinds of science and engineering collaboration. The book offers commentary from notable experts in the field along with case studies of large-scale collaborative projects, past and ongoing.

The projects described range from the development of a national virtual observatory for astronomical research to a National Institutes of Health funding program for major multilaboratory medical research; from the deployment of a cyberinfrastructure to connect experts in earthquake engineering to partnerships between developed and developing countries in AIDS research. The chapter authors speak frankly about the problems these projects encountered as well as the successes they achieved. The book strikes a useful balance between presenting the real stories of collaborations and developing a scientific approach to conceiving, designing, implementing, and evaluating such projects. It points to a future of scientific collaborations that build successfully on aspects from multiple disciplines.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]The Adaptive Web: Methods and Strategies of Web Personalization[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Peter Brusilovski, Alfred Kobsa, Wolfgang Nejdl
2007[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Web personalization has evolved into a large research field that attracts scientists from different communities such as hypertext, user modeling, machine learning, natural language generation, information retrieval, intelligent tutoring systems, cognitive science, and Web-based education. This state-of-the-art survey provides a systematic overview of the ideas and techniques of the adaptive Web and serves as a central source of information for researchers, practitioners, and students. The volume constitutes a comprehensive and carefully planned collection of chapters that map out the most important areas of the adaptive Web, each solicited from the experts and leaders in the field.

The largest part of the book focuses on personalization techniques, namely the modeling side of personalization and on adaptation. This technique-focused part is complemented by four domain-oriented chapters. The book also details recently emerging topics; it provides a prospective view to new ideas and techniques that are moving rapidly into the focus of the adaptive Web community and have to be included as a glimpse into a not so distant future.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing][book-title]The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman
2005[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
The Game Design Reader is a one-of-a-kind collection on game design and criticism, from classic scholarly essays to cutting-edge case studies. A companion work to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s textbook Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The Game Design Reader is a classroom sourcebook, a reference for working game developers, and a great read for game fans and players.

Thirty-two essays by game designers, game critics, game fans, philosophers, anthropologists, media theorists, and others consider fundamental questions: What are games and how are they designed? How do games interact with culture at large? What critical approaches can game designers take to create game stories, game spaces, game communities, and new forms of play?

Salen and Zimmerman have collected seminal writings that span 50 years to offer a stunning array of perspectives. Game journalists express the rhythms of game play, sociologists tackle topics such as role-playing in vast virtual worlds, players rant and rave, and game designers describe the sweat and tears of bringing a game to market. Each text acts as a springboard for discussion, a potential class assignment, and a source of inspiration. The book is organized around fourteen topics, from The Player Experience to The Game Design Process, from Games and Narrative to Cultural Representation. Each topic, introduced with a short essay by Salen and Zimmerman, covers ideas and research fundamental to the study of games, and points to relevant texts within the Reader. Visual essays between book sections act as counterpoint to the writings.

Like Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader is an intelligent and playful book. An invaluable resource for professionals and a unique introduction for those new to the field, The Game Design Reader is essential reading for anyone who takes games seriously.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Memory Practices in the Sciences[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Geoffrey C. Bowker
2005[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past — in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases — shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science — the making of infrastructures — and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past. At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three “memory epochs” of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century’s central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today’s sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, “database the world” in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Mizuko Ito, Misa Matsuda, Daisuke Okabe
2005[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
The Japanese term for mobile phone, keitai (roughly translated as “something you carry with you”), evokes not technical capability or freedom of movement but intimacy and portability, defining a personal accessory that allows constant social connection. Japan’s enthusiastic engagement with mobile technology has become—along with anime, manga, and sushi—part of its trendsetting popular culture. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, the first book-length English-language treatment of mobile communication use in Japan, covers the transformation of keitai from business tool to personal device for communication and play.

The essays in this groundbreaking collection document the emergence, incorporation, and domestication of mobile communications in a wide range of social practices and institutions. The book first considers the social, cultural, and historical context of keitai development, including its beginnings in youth pager use in the early 1990s. It then discusses the virtually seamless integration of keitai use into everyday life, contrasting it to the more escapist character of Internet use on the PC. Other essays suggest that the use of mobile communication reinforces ties between close friends and family, producing “tele-cocooning” by tight-knit social groups. The book also discusses mobile phone manners and examines keitai use by copier technicians, multitasking housewives, and school children. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian describes a mobile universe in which networked relations are a pervasive and persistent fixture of everyday life.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]Rules of Play[book-title]Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Katie Salen Tekinbaş and Eric Zimmerman
2003[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like “play,” “design,” and “interactivity.” They look at games through a series of eighteen “game design schemas,” or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance.

Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Paul Dourish
2001[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Computer science as an engineering discipline has been spectacularly successful. Yet it is also a philosophical enterprise in the way it represents the world and creates and manipulates models of reality, people, and action. In this book, Paul Dourish addresses the philosophical bases of human-computer interaction. He looks at how what he calls “embodied interaction” — an approach to interacting with software systems that emphasizes skilled, engaged practice rather than disembodied rationality — reflects the phenomenological approaches of Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other twentieth-century philosophers. The phenomenological tradition emphasizes the primacy of natural practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity. Dourish shows how this perspective can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. He looks in particular at how tangible and social approaches to interaction are related, how they can be used to analyze and understand embodied interaction, and how they could affect the design of future interactive systems.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology[book-title]Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Gary M. Olson, Thomas W. Malone, John B. Smith
2001[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]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.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Bonnie A. Nardi, Vicki L. O’Day
1999[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
The common rhetoric about technology falls into two extreme categories: uncritical acceptance or blanket rejection. Claiming a middle ground, Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O’Day call for responsible, informed engagement with technology in local settings, which they call information ecologies. An information ecology is a system of people, practices, technologies, and values in a local environment. Nardi and O’Day encourage the reader to become more aware of the ways people and technology are interrelated. They draw on their empirical research in offices, libraries, schools, and hospitals to show how people can engage their own values and commitments while using technology.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star
1999[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include “fainted in a bath,” “frighted,” and “itch”); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification — the scaffolding of information infrastructures.

In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.

The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city’s story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction[book-title]Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Bonnie A. Nardi
1996[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]Intended for designers and researchers, Context and Consciousness brings together 13 contributions that apply activity theory to problems of human-computer interaction. Understanding how people actually use computers in their everyday lives is essential to good design and evaluation. This insight necessitates a move out of the laboratory and into the field. The research described in Context and Consciousness presents activity theory as a means of structuring and guiding field studies of human-computer interaction, from practical design to theoretical development. Activity theory is a psychological theory with a naturalistic emphasis, with roots going back to the 1920s in the Soviet Union. It provides a hierarchical framework for describing activity and a set of perspectives on practice. Activity theory has been fruitfully applied in many areas of human need, including problems of mentally and physically handicapped children, educational testing, curriculum design, and ergonomics. There is growing interest in applying activity theory to problems of human- computer interaction, and an international community of researchers is contributing to the effort.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Geoffrey C. Bowker
1994[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
This is the story of how one company created and codified a new science “on the run,” away from the confines of the laboratory. By construing its service as scientific, Schlumberger was able to get the edge on the competition and construct an enviable niche for itself in a fast-growing industry. In this engaging account, Geoffrey Bowker reveals how Schlumberger devised a method of testing potential oil fields, produced a rhetoric, and secured a position that allowed it to manipulate the definition of what a technology is. Bowker calls the heart of the story “The Two Measurements That Worked,” and he renders it in the style of a myth. In so doing, he shows seamlessly how society becomes embedded even in that most basic and seemingly value-independent of scientific concepts: the measurement. Bowker describes the origins and peregrinations of Schlumberger, details the ways in which the science developed in the field was translated into a form that could be defended in a patent court, and analyzes the company’s strategies within the broader context of industrial science.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]A SMALL Matter of Programming-Bonnie Nardi[book-title]A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Bonnie A. Nardi
1993[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]A Small Matter of Programming asks why it has been so difficult for end users to command programming power and explores the problems of end user-driven application development that must be solved to afford end users greater computational power.
Drawing on empirical research on existing end user systems, A Small Matter of Programming analyzes cognitive, social, and technical issues of end user programming. In particular, it examines the importance of task-specific programming languages, visual application frameworks, and collaborative work practices for end user computing, with the goal of helping designers and programmers understand and better satisfy the needs of end users who want the capability to create, customize, and extend their applications software.
The ideas in the book are based on the author’s research on two successful end user programming systems—spreadsheets and CAD systems—as well as other empirical research. Nardi concentrates on broad issues in end user programming, especially end users’ strengths and problems, introducing tools and techniques as they are related to higher-level user issues.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]User Models in Dialog Systems (Symbolic Computation / Artificial Intelligence)[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]Edited by Alfred Kobsa, Wolfgang Wahlster
1989[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
User models have recently attracted much research interest in the field of artificial intelligence dialog systems. It has become evident that a flexible user-oriented dialog behavior of such systems can be realized only if the system disposes of a model of the user, containing assumptions about the user`s background knowledge as well as the user`s goals and plans in consulting the system. Research in the field of user models investigates how such assumptions can be automatically created, represented and exploited by the system in the course of an interaction with the user. This volume is the first survey pertaining to the field of user modeling. Most of the prominent international researchers in this area have contributed to this volume. Their papers are grouped into four sections: The introductory section contains a general view of the field as a whole, and a number of surveys of specific problems and techniques in user modeling. Sections two and three describe eight user modeling systems, with the focus lying on the automatic creation and exploitation of assumptions about the user respectively. The final section discusses several limits of current systems, and proposes solutions as to how some of the shortcomings might be overcome. In order to increase the quality and the coherency of the volume, each paper has been reviewed by all other contributors. Cross-references have been integrated wherever appropriate. All contributions are introduced in editorial prefaces pertaining to each section. A subject index and an extensive bibliography supplement the book.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]Kobsa-BenutzermodellierunginDialogsystemen[book-title]Benutzermodellierung in Dialogsystemen (Informatik-Fachberichte / Subreihe Künstliche Intelligenz) (German Edition)[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Alfred Kobsa
1986[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
User modeling is gradually becoming recognized as a key issue in the design of cooperative computer based dialogue systems. Assumptions about the beliefs, goals and plans of the user are seen as necessary prerequisites for a system to be capable of exhibiting user-oriented dialogue behavior, Research in this field, however, is still incoherent and lacks a solid groundwork of precise problem definitions, proposals for solutions, comparable realized systems. Much work in this area is done on a very informal base.

This work aims at contributing to such groundwork, both through theoretical analysis and by presenting a user model in which many of the theoretical proposals have been realized.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]

[book-listing]book1[book-title]Karel The Robot: A Gentle Introduction to the Art of Programming[/book-title]
[book-subtitle]By Richard E. Pattis
1981[/book-subtitle]
[book-paragraph]
Uses a creative approach to teach the basic skills and concepts of programming quickly. This edition offers excellent insights into problem solving and program design processes. It will also improve comprehension of such computer science considerations as loop invariants and recursion. Includes 60 color line drawings.
[/book-paragraph][/book-listing]