ITH - Centrum för studier av IT ur ett
humanvetenskapligt perspektiv och
Center for Collaborative Innovation vid Högskolan i Borås
9:2
Beginning with volume 9, the articles in
Human IT will be published as soon as possible after
acceptance. Each issue will consist of four peer reviewed or
open section articles, and when this size has been reached,
the issue will be 'closed' and provided with an
editorial. The size may be different in issues focusing
on a specific theme. The purpose of this change in publishing
pattern is that we wish to take advantage of the possibility
to publish articles as soon as possible after they have been
accepted for Human IT. We view this as an advantage
both for authors and for readers. / The editors
- Editorial
- Maria Mattus
Finding Credible
Information
A Challenge to Students
Writing Academic Essays
[Open section]
- Alois Pichler &
Gjermund Lanestedt
Humanistisk forskning og publisering i en
digital kontekst
Europeiske filosofimiljøer trekker veksler
på semantisk metadata-tagging [Humanities Research and
Publishing in a Digital Context: European Philosophy
Environments Draw on Semantic Metadata Tagging]
[Open section]
- Vimala Balakrishnan & Paul H.P. Yeow
SMS Usage Satisfaction
Influences of Hand
Anthropometry and Gender [Open section]
- Birgitta Davidsson, Louise Limberg,
Anna Lundh & Lena Tyrén
Informationssökning som diskursiv och
social praktik i de yngsta skolbarnens rum för lärande
[Information Seeking as a
Discursive and Social Practice in the Youngest
Schoolchildren's Rooms for Learning]
[Refereed section]
Dear readers,
It is a saying, at
least in Sweden, that time passes quickly when you’re having
fun. I realise as I am writing this that the present issue is
the 18th issue of Human IT that I have been
involved in producing. But even good things come to an end,
and this is most likely the last editorial that I will write.
It is time for me to go on to other assignments and to leave
Human IT in the very capable hands of Mats Dahlström,
the editorial board, and other co-editors (still to be
appointed). It is indeed with sadness that I give up my work
with the journal, but also with a great sense of excitement
for the future of Human IT. A number of interesting
articles are in the pipeline, we have begun looking at
measures to take to facilitate communication between authors,
editors, and reviewers, as well as possibly improve the web
site’s information architecture. I am looking forward to
seeing the journal take one, two, or three steps ahead in the
years to come. For now, I would like to extend a warm thank
you to all the people who have made working with Human IT
such a fun, valuable, frustrating, and, in the end, extremely
worthwhile experience over the years. Thank you!
But to make sure that
you keep busy over the upcoming holidays and don’t get stuck
in front of reruns on TV, we have a number of articles for you
to explore. Following on two issues that have had special
themes, it is time for an open issue with a number of
contributions that raise quite varied topics. This issue
contains two articles that are concerned with information
seeking in different types of educational environments.
Birgitta Davidsson, Louise Limberg, Anna Lundh and Lena
Tyrén report from the LIR (Lärandets innehåll och redskap)
project that investigated information seeking practices and
the use of ICT tools among young schoolchildren.
Interestingly, they find that for many different reasons the
children’s use of ICT tools – and the web in particular – is
highly regulated and controlled in the school environment.
Instead, the printed book still holds a strong position. The
authors draw on their own and others’ findings in their
conclusion that the way the children are taught to relate to
sources in the early years follows them up to the higher
school levels. As most of the sources the children use have
been chosen by their teachers and librarians, source
credibility is not made an issue of at this early stage.
Source credibility is
the topic of Maria Mattus’s study of university
students. A group of students writing theses for university
degrees were asked to estimate the importance they attribute
to different aspects of a digital document when seeking
information for academic purposes. The students state that
they draw on their own knowledge about a field (established
researcher, well-known references, abstract) as well as on
recommendations (teachers’ recommendations, suggestions from
the librarians) and on more formal aspects of the document
(year of publication, style/linguistic instinct) in evaluating
the credibility of a source. The issue of source credibility
in digital environments is currently an active research area,
to which Mattus’s article adds further knowledge.
A quite different
topic is investigated by Vimala Balakrishnan and
Paul Yeow, who look at how satisfied people are with the
keypad design factors of their mobile phones when texting,
depending on how large their hands and fingers are. This is a
crucial aspect that affects the daily life of many people. The
authors can establish that hand size does in fact affect how
easily people experience texting to be, to the degree where
some people with large hands prefer to phone up rather than
text in order to efficiently deliver a message.
Whereas Balakrishnan
and Yeow show that the physical design aspects of ICT tools
influence the use to which they are put, Alois Pichler
and Gjermund Lanestedt describe how the markup of
digital texts have consequences for their future use. The
authors present a number of humanities computing/text editing
projects in the EU funded DISCOVERY project, with focus on the
Wittgenstein archives in Bergen (WAB), Norway. They sketch
future improvements in scholarly text editing made possible by
XML-based technology, such as semantic coding. Particularly
attractive from the point of view of Human IT is, of
course, the emphasis the DISCOVERY project places on providing
open access to the rich research material that, for instance,
the Wittgenstein archives provide. This is a step towards not
only offering the published analyses of research to the public
free of charge, as open access journals such as Human IT
see as their mission, but to also make it possible for all
scholars to gain free access to source material.
The editorial staff at
Human IT wishes all the journal’s readers happy
holidays! In 2008, Human IT is planning to open with a
special issue on games and gaming. However, spontaneous
contributions are, as always, very welcome and we try to fit
them into the publishing schedule as soon as possible.
Borås in December 2007
Helena Francke
