ITH - Centrum för studier av IT ur ett
humanvetenskapligt perspektiv och
Center for Collaborative Innovation vid Högskolan i Borås
10:3
Dear readers,
We are happy to present this finalized issue of Human IT, 10.3. The issue indeed finalizes a whole volume, which means Human IT now celebrates 10 completed volumes over 13 years: 36 issues with roughly 200 articles of research in the digital humanities and its neighborhood. Per average, some 15 articles have been reviewed and published per year. Of those, some contributions have certainly made a mark in the international scene of digital humanities.
Throughout these 10 volumes, Human IT has always been run as a quite small-scale operation. Grateful as we are for the patient, long-term economic support we have received from the University of Borås and from NOP-HS (a Nordic grant supporting scholarly journals), we remain a journal working hard to survive. Given the budget cuts we suffered from a little more than a year ago (and which are still valid, I am afraid), we are now down to some 500 man hours of total Human IT work per year, to be divided on two editors (currently myself and Jonas Söderholm, whom I am happy to have by my side again). As our decided cause is not to compromise the scholarly quality of the journal contents, practically all of these time resources have to be reserved for reviewing, peer reviewing, revision work, copy editing, typesetting, and publishing. But even these tasks can’t be properly fulfilled by us editors alone. Human IT wouldn’t cope without the wonderfully generous contributions made by the double blind peer reviewers, reviewing colleagues, the internal and the external editorial committee, not to mention authors, readers, and others. A huge collective thanks to all of you!
The economic restrain forces us however to neglect some important work one would normally expect from a journal (even an academic one). I am thinking primarily of marketing and promoting. This is where we do need the help of all readers. Whenever you come across an interesting article in Human IT – as you frequently do, obviously – please mark it, e.g. by quoting it, by linking to it, by suggesting it to your friends and colleagues who would surely be interested in it too, or simply by using your profile page in Facebook to suggest it to your networked friends. Another area where more needs to be done is our web site, where some functions (e.g. search facilities) need to be updated and where we would like to add many useful features and new information (e.g. news, clippings, links). We are working our best to find the means and time slots to do so. And finally, we have not abandoned our plans of transferring Human IT into an Open Journal Systems platform, from which editors, authors, reviewers, and readers all would benefit. Our financial situation has currently put a halt - but not a definitive abandonment - to those plans.
In this third and last issue of volume 10, then, we have a varied menu of five (or six) healthy meals: appetizers as well as rich, full-sized dinners, covering all three sections of the journal.
Sara Kjellberg (Lund University in Sweden, department of library and information science) makes a thorough and highly interesting contribution in the refereed section. I suppose some of us follow or at least know of academic blogs or have colleagues following them, or perhaps run such a blog ourselves. There is a great deal of blog research going on, but surprisingly little has been devoted to academic blogs. This is a chance to read a close study of that particular genre (or sub-genre). Kjellberg has performed a case study of the Swedish academic blogosphere (67 blogs) and also provides us with an overview of blog research. She has much interesting to say about the relation between this blog genre and related genres and forms of communication, and I think she fruitfully maps the territory within which the academic blog fills a social and communicative function. The author wrote her article in Swedish, but suggested it be translated into English. We thought this was a splendid idea, as I am sure the article can attract an international audience, not least within the lively blog research communities. We have therefore made room in the issue (which is not particularly hard to do in a digital environment) to enclose two language versions of Kjellberg’s article.
In the second article of the refereed section, another Swedish scholar,
Therese Örnberg Berglund (Umeå University, and affiliated with its HumLab, a digital humanities facility I think many readers are familar with), presents research within close range to the sphere of digital humanities. Empirically, hers is an ethnographic study of student interaction at a design school, e.g. using instant messaging. Örnberg Berglund’s sound and stimulating article in one sense continues the track from the previous article by presenting research on communication and interaction, and on the arenas, modes and strategies with which communication is performed and conditioned, with a keen eye to factors such as tools, affordance and attention.
The issue then presents three excellent articles in Swedish, all of them with a more or less historical angle.
Erik Persson, Lund University, is skilled in the relation between computer science and various branches of the humanities. This is evident in his article on some of the problems inherent in mapping geolocations with tools and resources on the web, for instance their lack of easy usability and their often inconsistent archival and contextual practices. Persson presents ideas and some technical solutions for launching platforms and portals that would aid the user in search of the kinds of resource discussed.
Mats Edenius (Uppsala University, and who has indeed contributed to the journal before, see issue
4.4) writes a short but profound piece on the much debated surveillance and privacy laws that have recently been pulled through the legal system in Sweden, as in many other EU countries. Edenius makes us see the bonds between, or indeed web spun around those laws, the surveillance technologies, politics, and power, using a Benthamian panoptical view.
Karl-Erik Tallmo, finally, is a highly respected author, journalist, editor, and media researcher in Sweden (and has as well been published in Human IT before, see issues
1.4,
3.3, and
6.3). This time, Tallmo delivers a full-sized, substantial piece on the history, idea, and intellectual heritage of copyright. As Edenius did in his article, Tallmo takes his cue from the recent heated debate on copyright laws, law-suits, and technologies relating to file-sharing, illegal downloading, and pirate copying. Basically, and probably contrary to popular belief, these are at bottom phenomena with a several hundred year-old history. In fact, they are in all likelihood companions virtually as ancient as the technologies of printing and writing themselves. The public domain, Tallmo writes, must be protected, and fair use be considered “a positive right
per se, not just an exemption to plead as a defense for certain kinds of usage”.
I wish you all a happy reading, then, and hope to have you follow Human IT into its 11th volume and beyond as well!
Borås in July 2010
Mats Dahlström, editor
