Call for Papers

Special issue on

Social Aspects of Digital Information in Perspective

Special issue Editors: Roberta Lamb and Susan Johnson, University of Hawaii, Manoa Email: lamb@cba.hawaii.edu or susanj@hawaii.edu
Web: http://lamb.cba.hawaii.edu

Schedule

Submission deadline: 27 November 2003
Publication date: May 2004

Theme

This call solicits research papers on historically grounded perspectives of Social Informatics. This line of inquiry extends one research stream of the late Rob Kling, a pioneer in Social Informatics studies who strived for over 30 years to make social issues central to discussions about computing and information systems. For this issue, we are particularly interested in empirical examinations of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) that carefully depict and theorize about the cumulative influences of local histories on ICT use, with emphasis on the everyday aspects of living with digital information in the home, in the workplace, in research labs, in public places, and other social settings. We also welcome theoretically balanced examinations of utopian/dystopian projections about every-day Information Society futures; as well as critical examinations of the impact of past analyses of this kind.

This focus allows for a wide range of topics that may be best approached through empirical research combined with historical review. A non-exhaustive list of social aspects we are interested in would include research about:

Historical perspectives on perceived social changes attributed to the widespread use of digital formats
Changes in community interaction facilitated by digital exchanges
Shifts in professional identity and expertise presentation through new ICTs
Social implications of shopping online, voting online, and distance learning
Political implications of the informationalization of social activities
Critical examinations of economic shifts spurred by increasing digital activity

Many socio-technical approaches to these topics would be appropriate, while ethnographic studies and rich description would be particularly welcome. Although it is not the aim of this issue to examine the economics of commercial IT adoption, or the strategic management of information and communication technologies (what is often referred to as organizational informatics), we would welcome papers that examine the social aspects of digital information embedded within these topics, such as changing professional identities [1] or the sociality of documentation itself. [2]

Format

This issue will be a hypertext of annotated scholarship, edited and linked by the special issue editors and authors. In addition to traditional full length papers, we are soliciting accompanying Web pages that, on acceptance after peer review, will extend the paper with commentaries or more in-depth analyses of the issues raised in the papers. Each author should submit a research paper (5000 - 7000 words) and may submit one Web page (250 - 1500 words) that extends the paper with related text and/or links to data and multimedia presentations.

This call continues the JoDI tradition of exploring the new formats made available by the Web, while providing a context that is institutionally compatible with the conditions of academic authorship. It also encourages presentations of an Information Society as an ongoing dynamic process, rather than as a static endpoint of some series of events. Within this emergent context, research-in-progress papers may be particularly well-accommodated, and therefore appropriate.

Submission

Authors should submit their papers electronically using the submission form. Selecting the title or editor for this issue from the Theme or Editor drop-down box will alert the editor to your submission automatically. If sending a supplementary Web page, this should be mailed with the paper to the contact given on the submission form.

Before submitting please take note of the journal's Guidelines for submission: notes for authors, including the style for bibliographic notes and author details. We also wish to encourage external links to online content, and we would like you to include active links within your research paper, as well as including online sources in the bibliography.

All submissions will be subject to peer review. Publication will take place after the accepted papers and Web pages have been integrated into a hypertext Social Informatics issue by the editors.

Please contact the special issue editors if you have questions about the appropriateness of your planned submissions.

The Journal of Digital Information is an electronic journal published only via the Web. JoDI is currently free to all users thanks to support from the British Computer Society and Oxford University Press.

[1] Lamb, Roberta and Mark Poster (2003) "Transitioning Toward an Internet Culture: An Interorganizational Analysis of Identity Construction from Online Services to Intranets". In Global and Organizational Discourse About Information Technology, edited by E. H. Wynn et al. (Kluwer: Boston)
http://lamb.cba.hawaii.edu/pubs/InetCulture.pdf

[2] Brown, J. S. and P. Duguid (1996) "The Social Life of Documents". First Monday, 1(1), May
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue1/documents/