Social Aspects of Information Technology

Social Aspects of Information Technology
Contents
Computer Science Motivation

Computer systems are designed, built and used by people; they are components in larger socio-technical networks that include human beings; they are used for entertainment, finance, defense, transportation, shopping, dating, spamming, studying, etc. The success of a system is determined by the community of people who use it. Hence social and cognitive issues should be addressed in designing, building, evaluating and maintaining computer-based systems. Sadly, such issues are rarely taken sufficiently seriously, and as a result, many systems that are built cannot be used as intended, even more systems are abandoned before completion, cost and time overruns are more the rule than the exception, and user dissatisfaction is high. The lesson that computer systems are not purely technical objects seems very hard to learn, and very costly to ignore.

Social Science Motivation

The social study of science and technology is a thriving endeavor with a large and diverse community of researchers, who ask how science and technology arises out of communities of scientists and technologists, and how this interacts with larger communities. Information technology seems a particularly interesting (and socially important) site for research of this kind, and conversely, computer science (and mathematics) can bring an increased precision to certain aspects of this exploration, including the structure of certain representations. One problem in which we have been particularly interested is to determine the value systems of communities of practice, and of the artifacts that they use.

Personnel
Natural Ethics of Information Artifacts

This project explores the hypothesis that information artifacts embody definite but implicit value systems. One case study concerns the value systems of web search engines, including the values of both engine owners and engine users. See The Ethics of Databases, a paper based on an invited panel presentation at the 1999 Annual Meeting, 29 October 1999, of the Society for Social Studies of Science; a separate abstract is available. A similar talk was also given 6 December 1999 at the Annenberg Center of the University of Southern California, as part of a seminar series entitled Confronting Convergence; the paper will appear in a book of the same title.

A second case study concerns the value system of mathematicians. See the slides for The Reality of Mathematical Objects, a lecture in the UCSD Science Studies Colloquium, 20 November 2000. This work applies discourse analysis (in the sense of sociolinguistics), cognitive linguistics, ethnomethodology and semiotics to mathematical discourse and its natural ethics. There is also a pdf version. Warning: You may have to change the orientation of the pages from landscape to seascape; also, this is just a sketch of a paper, with many details missing.

A third case study, now in an early stage, concerns the value systems of music. This project is also developing computational methods to identify structures in complex temporal systems, such as music, using ideas from cognitive science, and from complexity and information theories, as well as from cultural studies and sociology. See the webnote Structure and Values in Music for more detail.

A fourth case study, also at an early stage, concerns the value systems of email "spam" such as chain letters, bogus virus warnings, virus contaminated email, and solicitations for penny stocks, miracle cures, new religions, miracle inventments, etc.

A related project concerns aesthetic values in art. Here I have edited two volumes, entitled Art and the Brain (Imprint Academic, October 1999; ISBN 0-907-84545-2; also appeared as Journal of Consciousness Studies, volume 6, No. 6/7, June/July 1999), and Art and the Brain (Part 2) with Eric Myin, (Imprint Academic, September 2000; ISBN 0-907-845-126; also appeared as Journal of Consciousness Studies, volume 7, no. 8/9, 2000. My Editorial Introduction to the first volume (pages 5-14), and my introductory piece for the second, What is Art? (pages 7-15) are available, as is my review of Visual Space Perception: A Primer, by Maurice Hershenson (MIT 1998). I am also Editor in Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies; for a short overview of the field, see the article Consciousness Studies, in preparation for the Encyclopaedia of Science and Religion; a pdf version is also available.

An early study of values, briefly reported in Requirements Engineering as the Reconciliation of Technical and Social Issues (pages 165-199 of Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues, edited with Marina Jirotka, Academic Press, 1994), elicited the values of a small corporate recruitment firm, by analyzing stories and jokes that members told during breaks (for coffee, lunch, etc.), using techniques from discourse analysis (in the sense of sociolinguistics) and ethnomethodology. Although this concerned an organization rather than an information artifact, it did field test some concepts and methods that are important in our later studies.

Sociology of Technology and Science

Our approach to the sociology of technology and science is developed in some detail in the courses CSE 175, Social and Ethical Issues in Information Technology (formerly CSE 190B), and CSE 275, Social Aspects of Technology and Science. Here are the synopses for these two courses:

CSE 175: This course explores issues on the interface between information technology and society, with a special focus on ethical issues. Topics include ethical theory, privacy and security, spam, electronic commerce, the digital divide, open source software, medical informatics, bioinformatics, actor-network theory, ethnomethodology, and some neo-classical economics. For more detail, see the course outline.

CSE 275:This course explores issues on the interfaces among technology, science, and society, with a special focus on information technology. Topics include privacy, the internet and the web, spam, electronic commerce, chat rooms, ethics, requirements engineering, public policy, actor-network theory, Kuhn's theory of paradigms, post-modernism, neo-classical economics, virtual reality, and more. For more detail, see the course outline.
Algebraic Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs and their meanings. This project attempts to make this area more systematic, rigorous and mathematical, as well as to do justice to its social foundations. Algebraic semiotics combines aspects of algebraic specification with social (especially ethnomethodological) semiotics. One major application area is user interface design. A particular case of this is the representation of mathematical proofs, as studied in the Tatami project, where our objective is to make proofs as understandable as possible. Many of these ideas have been implemented in the Kumo system using web technology plus some ideas from narratology (the systematic study of narrative - see Notes on Narrative.) A recent overview paper on the Kumo system, including the latest version of the Tatami conventions, which are its interface guidelines, can be found in Web-based Support for Cooperative Software Engineering, by Joseph Goguen and Kai Lin. In Annals of Software Engineering, volume 12, No. 1, pages 167-191, 2001, special issue on multimedia software engineering, edited by Jeffrey Tsai. A pdf version is also available.

The best source of detailed information on algebraic semiotics is the paper An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design. Basic material on user interface design can be found in the rather extensive class notes for the course CSE 271, along with motivation and some basics of algebraic semiotics, including the systematic measures for the quality of representations that it provides. Some further applications are informally discussed in the short webnote Information Visualization and Semiotic Morphisms. For some informal background, see the webnote Semiotic Morphisms and the paper On Notation. More information, including a bibliography and further links, can be found on the algebraic semiotics homepage.

Requirements Engineering

This project takes the view that requirements engineering is the attempt to reconcile the technical and social aspects of large development projects. Some work in this area can be seen in the slides for the lecture Requirements Engineering and User Interface Design, by Joseph Goguen, given at the Requirements Engineering Workshop, Buenes Aires, Argentina, August 1999. Here is its abstract:

Some of the most challenging problems in requirements engineering concern the user interfaces to complex systems. For many systems, a large part of the effort goes into the user interface, which also plays a large role in user perceptions of system quality. However, this area raises difficult issues in cognition, the structure of interaction, and even ethics. Methods that can approach such problems include semiotics, ethnography and cognitive psychology, which help to put context into the analysis. The most novel techniques used include algebraic semiotics, which provides measures of structural quality, and literary theory and analysis, which view interactive graphics as "text." Two case studies for this approach are the interactive theorem prover Kumo, and web search engines. The most novel techniques used include algebraic semiotics, which provides measures of structural quality, and literary theory and analysis, which view interactive graphics as "text."
Some earlier work is listed below; brief descriptions can be found in the following Brief Annotated Bibliography.
  1. Review of Intellectual Impostures, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (second edition), in (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, No. 1, 365, 9 April 2004, page 26.
  2. Semiotic Morphisms, by Joseph Goguen. An informal introduction to some basics of algebraic semiotics; for some formal details, see An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design, and for additional information, see CSE 271, a user interface design course using semiotics.
  3. Towards a Social, Ethical Theory of Information, by Joseph Goguen, in Social Science Research, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work, edited by Geoffrey Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star and William Turner (Erlbaum, 1997) pages 27-56. A pdf version is also available.
  4. Techniques for Requirements Elicitation, by Joseph Goguen and Charlotte Linde, in Proceedings, Requirements Engineering '93, edited by Stephen Fickas and Anthony Finkelstein, IEEE Computer Society, 1993, pages 152-164.
  5. Requirements Engineering as the Reconciliation of Technical and Social Issues, in Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues, edited with Marina Jirotka (Academic Press, 1994) pages 165-199.
  6. Social Issues in Requirements Engineering, by Joseph Goguen, in Proceedings, Requirements Engineering '93, edited by Stephen Fickas and Anthony Finkelstein, IEEE Computer Society, 1993, pages 194-195.
  7. The Dry and the Wet, by Joseph Goguen, in Information Systems Concepts, edited by Eckhard Falkenberg, Colette Rolland and El-Sayed Nasr-El-Dein El-Sayed, Elsevier North-Holland, 1992, pages 1-17; proceedings of IFIP Working Group 8.1 Conference (Alexandria, Egypt).
Other Topics

Blending has been postulated by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner as a new fundamental cognitive operation, which combines conceptual spaces; it has been shown to play a fundamental role in the theory of metaphor. Mathematical foundations can be provided by the rather recent and very abstract field called "category theory" (it is not related to the area of psychology of the same name), by noting that sign systems together with semiotic morphisms form a category. Some modest additional axioms are satisfied, which leads to the notion of a 3/2-category. The appropriate notion of colimit for such categories has interesting properties that make it suitable for studying the blending sign systems and their morphisms. Some interesting generalizations and new properties of blending also arise out of this framework. These and other topics are explained in the basic paper, An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design. See also the webnotes Semiotic Morphisms and Information Visualization and Semiotic Morphisms for brief intuitive introductions to certain issues.

The notion of discourse type is a natural extension of the notion of grammar from the level of individual sentences to the level of discourse. A discourse unit has defined boundaries, and a describable internal structure; a discourse type characterizes the structure of a class of discourse units. The structures of several different discourse types have been studied in some detail, including planning, reasoning, and command and control. See the following papers for more detail (unfortunately, none of these are available online):

  1. Structure of Planning Discourse, with Charlotte Linde, Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Volume 1, 1978, pages 219-251.
  2. On the Independence of Discourse Structure and Semantic Domain, with Charlotte Linde, in Proceedings, 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Parasession on Topics in Interactive Discourse, (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) 1980, pages 35-37.
  3. Reasoning and Natural Explanation, with Charlotte Linde and James Weiner, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Volume 19, 1983, pages 521-559.
  4. Crew Communication as a Factor in Aviation Accidents, with Charlotte Linde and Miles Murphy, in Proceedings, 20th Annual Conference on Manual Control, Volume II, edited by E. James Hartzell and Sandra Hart, NASA Conference Publication 2341, 1984, pages 217-248.
  5. Checklist Interruption and Resumption: A Linguistic Study, with Charlotte Linde, NASA Contractor Report 177460, NASA Contract NAS2-11052, July 1987; Structural Semantics Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).
  6. Linguistic Measures for Evaluating Flight Simulation, with Charlotte Linde, NASA Contract NAS2-11052, July 1987; Structural Semantics Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).
  7. Communication Training for Aircrews: A Review of Theoretical and Pragmatic Aspects of Training Program Design, with Charlotte Linde and Linda Devenish, NASA Contractor Report 177459, NASA Contract NAS2-12379, July 1987, Structural Semantics Final Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).
  8. Aircrew Communicative Competence: Theoretical and Pragmatic Aspects of Training Design, with Charlotte Linde and Linda Devenish, NASA Contract NAS2-11052, 1987; Structural Semantics Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).
Brief Annotated bibliography See also the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition homepage.

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