posted
At the suggestion of one of my professors, I'm going to experiment with writing a book. It will be non-fiction, and it will be dealing with social informatics (don't worry if you don't know what that is, its not too important to my question). It will probably be aimed at an academic audience, one at least partly undergraduate, though I don't know how "textbook-ish" it will be.
You all have heard me blather on for long enough on enough subjects. What should I write about?
As nearly anything can be related to social informatics, feel free to let your mind wander. Be as specific or general as you like.
I will share drafts of chapters with hatrack as I write, in a way which does not "publish" them.
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posted
The decision to write is preceding the content. I have no idea how a person would come up with content for a book without deciding to write a book.
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-Correlation between advancments in information technology and productivity. Are we close to maximizing the potential of information technology? How much more inefficiency in our economy can be solved by progress in IT? Why did I buy stock in Webvan.com?
-Distance learning: Will it replace B&M schools one day? What effect does DL have on socialization of our children?
Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
Oh, I realize what you may have been reading, Kat. Some companies might like first publishing rights, for instance, and being available on a public forum might be construed as publishing by them, or it could just be frowned upon by a publisher.
I'll put the chapters up to allow people to download them, but there will an additional level of indirection -- they'll be in a password protected directory.
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posted
*starts adding people to the list of those who will get a package in the mail which has a spring loaded pie launcher inside set to go off when opened*
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I'd like a look at the tools/systems used to organize, search and display information from a historical perspective and how that history inform current developments in the field and then what the latest developments are [in a variety of categories -- from structured databases to folksonomies to ???] and what directions the field is going in.
Does that make sense?
EDIT: Oh, yeah. And it'd also be interesting to include some case studies on how individuals (or even better groups i.e. reporters, doctors) use information tools -- what works and what barriers they run into.
posted
AND: One way to pitch it to make it seem less dry is to frame it as a question of gatekeepers/access stuff.
What gets lost in the current models for organizing information? Who end up being the gatekeepers? What types of information seem to become more important as a result?
A concrete example would be Google's algorithms. I admit that I rarely go beyond the first 3-5 pages of results when I'm searching for something. Most of the time that is because the link I find is "good enough". At other times I reformulate (narrow or refocus) the search. And sometimes I simply abandon it.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
Well, here's what I'm currently interested in (let me preface this by saying that our prof told us before spring break that we were going to have to write a paper about a modern polity and I spent all spring break thinking about it and today he narrowed the criteria so some of my ideas won't work):
A comparison of Zimbabwe and a third world country that's moving forward. Though that's a bit specific for a book, how 'bout an analysis of steps which have to be taken in order for a third world country to make it's way to the first world.
A study of how weak executives gained power (the currect situation in Bolivia made me think of this)
Switzerland and the art of neutrality
Oh, this would be a good one for you (I think) The inner workings of the education system in America, focusing on school systems.
The beginnings of a meritocracy in China (which is what I'm probably going to do my paper on, asuming the one video we watched on it in class is correct and there actually are the beginnings of a meritocracy in China)
Wow, I feel naked now, I hope these aren't really stupid ideas, I haven't actually researched any of them.
Posts: 4655 | Registered: Jan 2002
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posted
If you're really going to go about "social" informatics, I think there are a number of interesting topics:
1) People's access to and use of information on risk. How do people get the information that they use to decide on protecting themselves from risk or assessing risks. E.g., why wear a seatbelt? Why NOT fly on a plane...etc.
2) How can we frame public policy balancing convenience with privacy and security? Recently, several states' DMV records (including SSN data) have been hacked. There've been large scale data thefts from companies that process credit and other personal data. What should be done to make those systems secure but still make the data accessible.
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posted
Yeah, its definitely going to relate to social informatics. I'm looking quite closely at the new PhD program IU has in social and organizational informatics, and it really is a field I love (and hope to clarify somewhat; there are currently some people who would confine it to exclusively dealing with technical technologies -- basically stuff that runs on electricity -- whereas I want to use it in a mode of analysis for looking at many things as technologies, from governments to parking lots).
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posted
How about a book on social dynamics of internet forums? Specifically, if you can find out why certain internet forums are more popular than others, your book can make a lot of money.
I know as a webmaster I would pay $29.99 to learn how to make my forum as popular as Hatrack. Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
Oooh. That's another good one. How can government use data-driven decision making processes. Much of what governments do is really hard to deal with from an outcome measurement point of view. They can measure WHAT they did, but not DID IT WORK.
A book on how to measure and what to measure...metameasurement?
Also, data quality is a big deal. You might look at the use of flawed data and some thoughts about how data quality can be measured and assured. And the return on investment for improving data quality...
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One of the problems social informatics is tackling is convincing people its not that simple, actually, so many people view technologies as "just add water" solutions, when they're more like "add months and months or maybe years and years of constant, attentive, planned care" much of the time.
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posted
Yes, that's a big problem of informatics in general, Bob, evaluation criteria. Just convincing people they need evaluation metrics in IT is astonishingly hard -- if they're considered at all, they're usually one of the first things cut from a budget.
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Ah, I see. Well expand my proposal to include non-tech types of information, then. I'd still totally dig it.
This may be too broad to be useful, but the main questions I'm interested in are:
How is information gathered, stored, organized and accessed?
How does the way it is gathered, stored and organized influence how it is accessed and interpreted?
And what are the major factors that influence what data becomes valuable and referenced and what is forgotten, lost and/or ignored?
To use a mundane example:
What are the implications of moving from Rolodexes to PDAs/Outlook when it comes to gathering, inputting and storing information on contacts? What other forms of storing that type of information are there and how are they used? How have the various forms (coupled with various modes of contacing your contacts -- e-mail, phone, informal and formal meetings, faxes, memos, etc.) changed how work gets done?
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posted
if you decide to write a book about your high school orchestra experience, I'll send you to be eaten by some troll.
Yes I realize that's not really what you were planning, but I need it known, and the trolls are hungry.
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
Right now I'm tending towards using the nicely nebulous working title "Political and Organizational Informatics".
I'll be touching on a lot of stuff, but not so much the privacy issues (which are more other subfields of social informatics). While privacy issues are important and interesting, there's a lot of noise in that area right now, and a lot of posturing. I'd prefer to avoid diving in there, though at times I will touch on it a little.
This will be more dealing with issues with technology in politics and organizations, and also analyzing organizations political and otherwise from a technological/information oriented perspective.
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posted
To me, the most important issue in the informatics world right now is the quality of information -- and how, exactly, that quality is determined. Consider the Wiki model, or the prevalence of blogs. Has the idea of a truly authoritative source become outdated? And if not, how does one locate an authoritative source in a field of a thousand wannabes?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
My main interest in this area right now is a squashing together of the prosecutor's fallacy and the creation of widespread sets of information.
Brief explanation of the prosecutor's fallacy (I know you know):
Suppose you have a test for a disease that is 99% accurate (in both the false positive and false negative sense). Further, suppose that 1 in 10,000 people have the disease.
If you test 1 million people. 100 of them will have the disease. Of those 100, 1 will test negative, 99 positive.
999,900 will not have the disease. Of these people, 9,999 will test positive for the disease (1% false positive).
This means that 99% of the people who test positive will not have the disease.
This pattern repeats itself in many areas: DNA testing, HIV testing, etc. It's not well appreciated by the average person, and even experts fall afoul of it. For example, NY started testing wide portions of the population for HIV and got an enormous number of false positives. Given the treatment at the time, this had very bad effects.
Now imagine we have information about 100,000,000 people in this country, with 100 attributes for each. Suppose some combination of those attributes provides a 70% accurate test of something.
Someone will come up with the bright idea of writing a query on the database to run that test for everyone.
Assuming the thing being tested for doesn't happen that often, there will be a huge number of false positives. This can divert resources. If the test is one about law enforcement, a lot of innocent people will be investigated.
Edit: I realize I didn't really describe the topic for the book, but I think you can see several directions to go. There are also legitimate uses for such databases - simply cranking out correlations between factors or combinations of factors. These wouldn't necessarily tell us anything definite, but it would suggest avenues for future research. Kind of preliminary epidemiological studies of some kind.
A side note is how these preliminary findings get reported in the press, adopted as common wisdom, and then used as an excuse to scoff at science when true studies find out the link isn't really there. I've always thought the press was double-dipping on those stories, reporting on common perceptions they artifically created.
quote:As nearly anything can be related to social informatics, feel free to let your mind wander. Be as specific or general as you like.
So I said
quote:Polyester.
fugu then replied
quote:*starts adding people to the list of those who will get a package in the mail which has a spring loaded pie launcher inside set to go off when opened*
posted
You anticool people have such weird value systems. "pie on a spring loaded launcher = bad" indeed!
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