More Than Screen Deep Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 411-424
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From page 411... ...
is strictly limited to studies of individual human actors interacting with specific packages of hardware and software. This focus of work has been very successful, producing among other things the innovations of "pointing" aids such as the mouse, trackball, touchscreen, and digital pad, as well as the graphical screen interface ubiquitous in all modern operating systems.
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From page 412... ...
The applications of these technologies have caught the attention of scholars interested in fundamental questions of human discourse, social network construction and maintenance, identity and personality formation and expression, and the social construction of meaning and reality. These rapidly growing areas of interest have been stimulated by the stunning speed with which major components of the national information infrastructure such as the Internet and the World Wide Web have invaded social life in all dimensions.
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From page 413... ...
It is certain that a concern about every-citizen interfaces to the national information infrastructure must embody such perspectives. While it is true that at some level all interface issues can be traced to rudimentary human-computer interface concerns as represented by the parochial HCI community, these broader issues of usability involve concerns that have nothing at all to do with the narrow HCI focus and must be addressed by research methods that traditional HCI researchers would never consider.
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From page 414... ...
The American Airlines effort to replicate its marvelous success in airline reservations systems in the French national railways and in its Encompass freight management system come to mind as just two examples. Research into higher-level challenges is aimed at learning what works and what does not and putting that knowledge to work.
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From page 415... ...
But advances in conceptual tools such as game theory have made possible much more sophisticated modeling of possible interactions among actors under different assumptions, including enablement from new information technologies. Such studies seldom provide real predictive power in the sense that they can tell designers or decision makers exactly what to do.
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From page 416... ...
4j6 ~ ~ Sag DEW ~1s lack of systematic study makes it default to 1dent1~ holes in existing knowledge and theory Mat require Wrier research attention. These kinds of studies re-he mulUdisciplinary research approaches' involving speciaUsts Mom 1nformat10n and computer sciences' management' and Me social sciences.
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From page 417... ...
Every citizen should have some way of gaining access to information that has been made public. In some cases this may require special devices, language help, training, or economic assistance.
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From page 418... ...
I also believe that working on complex, real-world problems requires the cooperation, and perhaps the friendly competition, of numerous research groups. The speech community has shown remarkable progress working together through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in collecting and sharing data, trying various approaches, and publishing results.
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From page 419... ...
First, the penetration of personal computers into the lowest socioeconomic status quartile is low and staying low. This would allow people without the financial resources immediate access to the Internet.
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From page 420... ...
Being able to do a better job of indexing, summarizing, and locating text would drive better natural language processing. Again, the HTML tags of Web sites provide a potential additional source for natural language understanding systems.
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From page 421... ...
Audio input/output with natural language processing gives the possibility of more selective searches and also provides strong motivation since audio scanning is more onerous than visual scanning. One potential source of information is to use the user's current task and past history to help focus a search.
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