InfoMatters

Just back from a fascinating presentation by Aaron Marcus on the importance of culture-centered design. He was a guest here of the ASIST Student Chapter at the iSchool and spoke for almost two hours with questions from the audience. His work leans heavily on Hofstede’s model of cultural dynamics, which he acknowledges has several weaknesses, but he presented an interesting mapping of the general characteristics of cultures (too often for my taste reduced to ‘nationality’) and sample web sites one finds in government, university and large company websites that represent said culture. Fascinating work, but more needs to be done.

The ASIST 2007 conference in Milwaukee this week was also a relatively lively affair. Keynoter Anthea Stratigos from Outsell presented a fast paced look at the world and I believe surprised many of us with the statement that China was fast becoming the leading English-speaking nation in the world. No reference provided but if it is even close to being true, what are the cultural implications? If nothing else, why do relatively recent listings of countries where English is spoken, even if not recognized as an official language, seem to make no mention of this? The best I can do to track this comment is back to the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who apparently predicted that Chinese speakers of English would outnumber all other English-language speakers in the world by 2025. Sound bite as science?

I also had a chance to talk with Tefko Saracevic and Don Kraft about changes they had seen in submissions to their respective journals (Information Processing and Management and JASIST). Tefko noted that he witnessed as many submissions in the last few years as he had received in the 15 preceding years, a fact he attributes to the emergence of information research in China and India. Could the day come when American and European scholars will compete to submit to Asian journals? If it happens it will seem inevitable and obvious with hindsight, but will it happen? One suspects there are many forces at work here, only some of which we recognize. In the meantime, this submission glut has pushed up the rejection rates for these journals to record highs.

I took part in a panel on Digital Genres that, despite its theme, drew a large and very lively audience at 8.30 am Tuesday morning. This really was a panel (not an attempt to sneak papers past reviewers) to which each presenter was limited to 3 minutes and then had to answer questions. Before we knew it, the audience got stuck in and took us on a tour of the problems with definition, the lack of appreciation in the field for earlier work, the absence of a well-informed archival perspective, the value of genre in searching and the emergence of genre in the digital realm. This was the hightlight of my conference sessions but of course, I am biased.

The special issue of Information Research with the Proceedings of the CoLIS 2007 conference in Sweden has now been published. There’s a lot of interesting reading here but let me point to a couple of papers I like. The Talja and Hartel piece examining the concept of user-centeredness in the information literature is a worthy contribution and should be required reading for those who wish to understand the emergence of this defining orientation within our field. Also, David Bawden’s paper, Information as self-organized complexity, provoked a lot of discussion at the conference itself and is now available to all.

I’ve been saying ‘no’ to an invitation from a journal to handle a paper review for a couple of weeks but it seems you just can’t say ‘no’ to Elsevier. It’s not that I don’t review, I do, and often, but I do so for the four journals I’ve committed to work with and they keep my inbox pretty full. Let’s not forget, reviewing is time-intensive, effortful and yes, completely voluntary — free labor that keeps the process moving as it compunds the free labor authors put in creating the documents. Applied Ergonomics, a journal that might claim to represent good design practice, has taken it upon itself to invite reviewers by sending an automated email which requires the recipient to register with them in order to view and handle the manuscript. This makes a lot of sense for reviewers - the papers are in one locatable place, reviews can be submitted there, no need for the old fashioned paper and envelope stage, and let’s face it, once you’ve registered, you’ve put yourself on their list of available reviewers for the future. The trouble with Applied Ergonomics (and most of these systems) is that you cannot say ‘no’ to a request without registering. It’s clear something is wrong in the world when you have to make an effort to decline an invitation you do not want and did not seek — merely ignoring it only results in pesky automated reminders. I told the editorial office I would not handle the MS, and I would not register in their system to tell them so. One week later I get a letter asking me to review the same manuscript and a reminder to register if I wanted to decline. And so it goes on. Applied Ergonomics describes itself as “aimed at all those interested in applying ergonomics/human factors in the design, planning and management of technical and social systems at work or leisure”. Irony is a lost art.