Modeling the human factors of scholarly communities supported through the Internet and World Wide Web
✍ Scribed by Gaines, Brian R. ;Chen, Lee Li-Jen ;Shaw, Mildred L. G.
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 335 KB
- Volume
- 48
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-8231
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The Internet (the net) and World Wide Web (the web) Makedon, & Rebelsky, 1995). The cost of production and have grown rapidly in the past decade and have come dissemination of digital publications is also substantially to play a major role in supporting discourse and publicalower than that of paper publications leading to prediction in scholarly communities. The development and aptions of the demise of paper journals on economic grounds plication of new services has been very rapid with little alone (Odlyzko, 1995). The impediments to electronic central planning, and despite the widespread use, there is little information as yet on the human factors of the publication supplanting paper publication are primarily use of the net and web. In particular, models of the huthe sociological ones of scholarly communities providing man factors of individuals interacting with workstations a supporting infrastructure in terms of quality control and have to be extended to take into account the essential well-defined publication procedures and long-term access social aspects of computer-mediated discourse and guarantees (Gaines, 1995).
publication. This article provides a framework for analyzing the utility, usability, and likeability of net and web However, the net and web offer a new medium for services, and illustrates its application to significant asscholarship that goes beyond the mimicry of paper publipects of supporting scholarly communities. The utility of cation. Digital publication provides facilities that greatly the net and web are measured in terms of the growth of improve on paper publication, such as making color freely usage, and the different services involved are distinguished in terms of their specific utilities. A layered proavailable, supporting multimedia video and sound, and tocol model is used to model discourse through the net, allowing datasets and programs to be included which may and is extended to encompass interaction in communibe accessed interactively and support animation, simulaties. An operational criterion for distinguishing different tion, and the independent reproduction of analyses (Claercommunities is defined in terms of the types of awareness that resource providers and users have of one an-bout, 1992). In addition, since the publications are comother. A temporal model of discourse processes is develputer-readable and accessible, the digital medium makes oped that enables the spectrum of services ranging from possible automatic indexing through content analysis.
real-time discourse to long-term publication to be ana-There are also social innovations in publishing which lyzed in a unified framework. The dimensions of awareattempt to combine informal and formal publishing such
ness and time are used to characterize and compare the full range of net services, and model their unification as InterJournal (Redi and Bar-Yam, 1995), a technology through the next generation of web browsers.