[Sighci-l] suggestions

[barreau at email.unc.edu]

I like Murray's suggestion about smaller communities, and I think Xia 
recommended some possible ones, particularly the focus on user interfaces 
for IR.

I will share an area of interest I have to see if anyone else is 
interested.  The description that follows is brief and a little vague, but 
if others are doing work in this area, please contact me off list and we 
can discuss it further.  Perhaps we could generate a proposal for an HCI 
session.

Ultimately, it is the individual user who interacts with a computer or 
system, so the HCI designation is appropriate.  However, I am interested in 
what may actually be a layer of that interface, the "organizational layer." 
In prior work, I referred to it as the "organizational interface" (a term 
used by Malone, Grudin, and others, although with different emphasis).  I 
am interested in how systems, particularly the user interface to systems, 
can/should be designed to help the worker in her specific organizational 
context.  More than being intuitive at the task level, it involves clarity 
for the task in context.  This was not much of an issue when systems were 
home grown, but the move to generic, commercial, off-the-shelf products 
meant that systems (or workers) had to be adapted to fit specific 
environments.  While some would argue that this is no longer an issue since 
Web-like or Microsoft-like interfaces are the norm for all contexts, I 
think this is an area where research is lacking and where there is room for 
improvement in design.  The topic incorporates a little organizational 
communication, metadata, information use and users, CSCW, and information 
architecture as well as HCI.

Again, if anyone is interested, please contact me off list.  [I'll gladly 
accept critiques as well.]

Deborah



--On Tuesday, December 10, 2002 12:26 AM -0500 Murray Turoff 
<turoff at concentric.net> wrote:

> I joined ASIS in the late 60's and IR was a secondary but strong
> interest.  I appreciated some of the early work in HCI and some of the
> excellent review articles done in the annual volumes of sort of state of
> the art review.  Since my own area then and over the years has been the
> design of Computer Mediated Communications Systems which tends to be a
> generator of large amounts of text there is a clear overlap of
> interest.  One of our new faculty in our new Information Systems
> department is doing some great work in automatic indexing and I have
> talked her into applying it to the transcripts of some of our distance
> learning courses and the results are quite interesting.  If I can
> recover from being a new chair and the chaos in New Jersey with budget
> cut backs and the "MERGER" or "RESTRUCTURING" (those two words indicate
> the wide ambiguity in what we are having to deal with) there might be
> some interesting papers in that area.
>
> In any case I would like to see more of the early spirit of those state
> of the art reviews in some HCI group.  I am afraid that while ACM SIGHCI
> is certainly exciting and has a strong industry following, I find there
> is a lot of rediscovery there under new jargon forced by vendor attempts
> to put old wine in new bottles.
>
> How big a group of people is this mailing list and I would think if this
> SIG really wants to be come more cohesive and form more of a research
> community or invisible college we should move to a true group
> communication system and we would need some volunteers willing to act as
> active facilitators of particular conferences on particular topics of
> interest to small groups of 20 or so.  Does some one want to design a
> simple survey and collect it with requests for topics they would be
> interested in an on going dialogue and what they feel would be critical
> mass and who is interested in taking leadership roles on given topics
> which is going to be some regular investment in time.  It would be a
> good role for a young enthusiastic researcher in the given topic and
> might have an objective of building some sort of collaborative state of
> the art and review of challenges in research type document.
>
> Staying with the mailing list is fine and can serve for information
> pooling and relevant announcements but it will not build a real
> community.
>
>
>
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