Kling (1999) defined social informatics as "the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts" (Kling, 1999). This extended abstract proposes a definition of literature and art informatics (LAI): the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their role in the creative efforts of writers and artists. Expanding social informatics to include creative activities in literature and the arts will benefit the social informatics research community in several ways. First, it will address the paucity of empirical scholarship meant to examine the role of information technology in the creative efforts of writers and artists. Second, it will open another area of inquiry within social informatics which will provide additional opportunities for validating bodies of theory that can usefully inform our scholarship. This abstract will also discuss a current set of studies being conducted as examples of one possible path for LAI research.

This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing. This paper describes the use of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) for data exploration as part of a recently completed study of the use of information technology (IT) by literary authors. The study discussed in this paper constitutes part of an ongoing effort to establish Literature and Art Informatics (LAI), the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their role in the creative efforts of writers and artists. This paper is primarily methodological in nature.

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006". Context is a key idea in the definition of social informatics. A major aim of the field is identifying the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in some social context -- in Society at large, or in more specific and intimate settings. This paper sketches the divergent ways in which context is understood.

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006." The development and current uses of digital libraries and digital environments supporting humanities scholarship will be analyzed through the agency of disciplinary communities that are primary users of these resources. The pioneering efforts of individual scholars and digital humanities initiatives are an integral part of the history of the first generation of digital libraries. Significant collections of primary source materials shaped by scholars themselves point to the social nature and disciplinary shaping of technological development, in which domain specialists have become technology innovators. The proposed paper will survey exemplary scholarly editing and archival projects of the first generation from the point of view of their developers. The paper will also present an analysis of the literature of the digital humanities field in relation to that development. Future trends of shaping collections of primary sources for user communities in the traditional disciplines will be discussed as well.

To appear in Government Information Quarterly sometime in 2006 or early 2007. / This paper develops a framework to assess the public information provided on program level government agency Websites. The framework incorporates three views of government information obligations stemming from different assumptions about citizen roles in a democracy: the private citizen view, the attentive citizen view, and the deliberative citizen view. The framework is employed to assess state Websites containing controversial policy information about chronic wasting disease, a disease effecting deer and elk in numerous U.S. states and Canada. Using the framework as a guide, the paper considers what information agencies should provide given the three different views of government information obligations. The paper then outlines the costs and benefits of fulfilling each view of government information obligations including issues of limited resources, perceived openness and credibility, press coverage, and policy making control.

This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing. This paper describes the use of multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) for data exploration as part of a recently completed study of the use of information technology (IT) by literary authors. The study discussed in this paper constitutes part of an ongoing effort to establish Literature and Art Informatics (LAI), the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their role in the creative efforts of writers and artists. This paper is primarily methodological in nature.

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006"

This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing. This conceptual essay explores how symbolic interactionism can inform social informatics, particularly in the study of socially constructed concepts such as privacy. Examining how physical and virtual objects are defined and constructed can be, and often is, a significant component of social informatics investigations (Kling, 2000; Kling, Rosenbaum, & Sawyer, 2005). Perhaps this is particularly important in domains were those constructions are still emerging, or are in the process of changing, as in Web 2.0. Thus, this essay suggests that social informatics can use symbolic interactionism as a theoretical underpinning to analyzing various aspects of Web 2.0. In the following sections, I review symbolic interactionism, demonstrate how it complements social informatics perspectives, and illustrate how it could inform social informatics research by examining privacy in the context of Web 2.0.

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is a review of a submission entitled "Indiana's Community Networking Movement: Websites Then and Now" at the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006