A “Grand Challenge”: Measuring Information Societies

Even though there has been a proliferation of e-society measures in recent years, analyses of the metrics of the “information society” are still far from responsive to the needs of many stakeholders and continue to suffer from a number of serious limitations. Issues in eight critical areas are briefly presented. They include: definition of the universe to be measured; definition of the objects and phenomena to include in the universe; need to establish measurements based upon solid theories; units of measurements; data sources and collection; methods of analysis and construction of indicators; target audiences; and purpose and utilization of measurements. An organized collective effort, which could provide the impetus for the development of a coherent academic field of study, is called for to address this “grand challenge.”     

Xerox Project: Photocopy Machines as a Metaphor for an “Open Society”

This article shows how various meanings of a new communication technology are born or get transformed when placed in a different political context via a case study of a program organized by the Soros Foundation in 1984 to promote democratic values (the idea of an “open society”) in Hungary. This program, called the Xerox project, helped hundreds of public institutions acquire photocopy machines. Under the suppressive Hungarian regime of the 1980s the appearance of photocopy machines as a new means of copying texts had serious political consequences. By means of historical research and expert interviews, this article analyzes the nature of these consequences and examines how certain meanings and uses of photocopy machines evolved in the latter half of the 1980s.     

An efficient file structure for specialized dictionaries and other “lumpy” data

There are many cases where it is necessary to store sets of data that are variable in length, and to search these in order to satisfy requests for subsets with a common characteristic. This article presents a file structure that holds an integrated English dictionary used to locate clusters of words for presentation to an intelligent spelling error correction system. Although the emphasis has been on misspelling, the structure presented is capable of handling any other types of lumpy data provided the characteristics used in search requests can be translated into a set of integer numbers.     

A measure of “efficiency factor”— Communication theory applied to document selection systems

An imperfect document selection system is represented as the analogy of a system in which symbols are selected and transmitted through a noisy channel. Provided that transmission reception uncertainties and not meaning are considered, it is suggested that one of Shannon's equations is applicable, and a single figure measure of system efficiency, H_t, is proposed.Values obtained using this new yardstick are compared with Recall/Precision values obtained for a typical system. Further research is required to test whether system “improvements” resulting in higher values of H_t are perceived as such by users.     

“The Art of Knowing”: Social and Tacit Dimensions of Knowledge and the Limits of the Community of Practice

Community of practice theory is inherently a social theory. As such it is distinct from more individualist accounts of human behavior, such as mainstream economics. Consequently, community of practice theory and economics favor different accounts of knowledge. Taking a community of practice perspective, this article challenges economists' attempts to reduce knowledge to information held by individuals and to reject tacit knowledge as mere uncodified explicit knowledge. The essay argues that Polanyi's notion of a tacit dimension affected numerous disciplines (including economics) because it addressed aspects of learning and identity that conventional social sciences overlooked. The article situates knowledge, identity, and learning within communities and points to ethical and epistemic entailments of community practice. In so doing it attempts to limit, rather than expand, the scope of community of practice analysis and to stress the difference, rather than the commonalities, between this and other apparently congenial forms of social analysis.