Human Interaction Books

An excellent, in depth, treatment of this topic. Her framework addresses "core activities within a task landscape," ie, dealing with large amounts of information, finding your way through the analysis & making sense of the results. Then she presents case studies applying this framework to different fields, including the design of a visualization tool.

Provides frameworks for exploration and discussion of designing for usefulness. Due to the youth of the field it doesn't provide complete solutions or processes.

Brings together, organizes articulately, and effectively cites authoritative resources.

Provides a strategic framework for modeling users context/work at a process vs task oriented level.

Has relevant examples of complex situations that address meaningful issues for users
- Marketing Research - optimal product mix decisions
- Healthcare - complex social and technical systems
- IT - troubleshooting sophisticated systems
- Project Mgt - managing projects

"The problem with groupware is that it's been very expensive and difficult to implement. With the introduction of cheap and easy-to-construct Intranets, that's no longer the case," begins Melanie Hills in her new book, "Intranets as Groupware." Intranets and groupware can help employees communicate more effectively, capture and share their knowledge, and learn and innovate.

Melanie Hills is an Internet technologies consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and a founder of consulting firm Knowledgies. In this material, she builds on her earlier book - "Intranet Business Strategies" - and goes beyond basic Intranet installation to address building groupware capabilities into Intranets. Case studies are drawn from Intranet implementations in AT&T, Texas Instruments (TI), J.C. Penney, and EDS.

The material is well-presented, and includes checklists for choosing Intranet products, implementing groupware, and appointing Intranet facilitation consultants. 11 chapters cover a wide range of issues including advantages and disadvantages of Intranets, groupware product reviews, implementation paths and challenges, and the impact of groupware on workflow.

Some of the first organisations to create internal Webs included Lockheed, Hughes and SAS Institute. According to some estimates from International Data Corporation, there may be 4.7 million Intranet servers in existence by the year 2000, and the revenues for collaborative software will reach $6.6 billion that year.

Factors leading to the necessity of Intranets include worldwide acceleration of user expectations due to globalisation and spread of the Internet, and increasing needs for improving internal communication and knowledge worker productivity. Intranets can be fast, easy and cheap to implement, scalable, and flexible; they can capture and share expertise, create new business opportunities, and help leverage Extranets for purposes like EDI.

Possible disadvantages of Intranets include the potential for chaos, security risks, management fears, business culture clash, information overload, wasted productivity, and hidden or unknown costs.

Intranets have already been successfully deployed in numerous companies. EDS has acquired the right to place the U.S. Patent Information Services database on its Intranet; it also provides its employees with a customised news report service called infoAlert via PointCast, and uses chat as part of its Global Communicators Network and IRC for a CIO weekly chat. Bell Atlantic's Intranet saves several hundred thousand dollars through consolidation and reduced printing. Silicon Graphics has reported savings in processing requisitions via its Intranet, Silicon Junction.

J.C. Penney's Intranet, jWeb, helps cut costs in communicating between its offices in 37 countries. AT&T uses its Intranet as a virtual meeting place. Booz Allen says its Intranet has helped leverage its intellectual capital by recording its expertise and providing contact information for its consultants. Some such case studies are also available online, as in "How Sun Saves Money, Improves Service Using Internet Technologies."

Some companies even obtain additional revenues on Intranet sites by letting vendors advertise to their employees.

Groupware products help create an organisation memory, and boost communication, coordination and collaboration. They include functions like calendaring, scheduling, voice conferencing, videoconferencing, electronic meeting systems, data whiteboards, discussion and live chat. Due to the impact of the Intranet, costs of groupware are coming down, and they are becoming increasingly Web-enabled.

According to Peter Sange, author of "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation," the only sustainable competitive advantage comes from an organisation's ability to learn. This will require the use of trained personnel as "social systems analysts," according to Tom Davenport, author of "Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology" (in his piece called "Software as Socialware," published in "CIO" magazine).

A 50-page review covers groupware products like Lotus Notes and Domino, Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Novell Groupwise, NetManage Chameleon, Oracle InterOffice, RadNet WebShare, Netscape Navigator and CoolTalk, Collabra, White Pine Enhanced Cu-SeeMe, Galacticomm Worldgroup Internet Server, Forefront RoundTable, Allaire Forums, and O'Reilly WebBoard.

Hills provides case studies of how such tools have actually helped collaboration for engineering product development, support human resources processes, conduct interviews and training across the Internet, manage financial reports, create document repositories, schedule team meetings, share resources like presentation materials, initiate trouble tickets, and provide version control for revised documents.

So how does a business figure out which tools - or suite of groupware - to choose? Hills provides a useful set of criteria for evaluation: the openness of the platform, its ease of use, basic and training costs, installation path, vendor support, ability to use it over the Internet, migration paths from other tools, and offline use.

Some proprietary groupware, such as Lotus Notes, requires "an army of highly trained programmers and systems administrators." Eric Hahn of Netscape strongly advocates the use of open standards, due to the "wonderful synergy when the same technology is used inside the corporation and on a planetary scale between corporations."

"Certainly the most talked-about advantage of Intranet groupware is the low cost," says Hills. Security is a concern for some Web-enabled products, though the situation should improve with developments like Secure Socket Layer. Some proprietary interfaces tend to be much richer in multimedia presentation and interactivity.

Four chapters cover actual implementation of Intranet groupware, and ways of calculating ROI (such as assessing the total costs of updating and reprinting manuals frequently for all employees in an organisation, and comparing this with the costs of setting up an Intranet and publishing the manuals online).

A good strategy for growing an Intranet is in much the same way as the Internet itself: a decentralised, grassroots, but sometimes chaotic manner. It helps if the CIO catches the vision of the Intranet and becomes the champion, says Hills. An outside consultant can help facilitate the process by identifying sources of information, forming an Intranet team, and helping them get focused. Infrastructure assistance from an ISP should be evaluated with respect to criteria like serving remote locations and mobile users, business service orientation, and points of presence.

Key points to remember include the need to build enthusiasm, create demos, address people issues and not just technical issues, use facilitators, and plan capacity ahead of demand.

Challenges lie in the dynamics of working in teams. "Groupware depends on sharing, which is an alien concept in most corporations today. The first step, long before you think about the technology, is to figure out how to get people to share all the things they've accumulated over the years and become so good at hoarding," Hills cautions. "You have to get people working together and cooperating before groupware will work."

This may be a problem in organisations where there is an entrenched hierarchy, lots of competition between employees, and lack of participatory discourse. "Successful implementations are usually bottom-up, grassroots efforts. It's most effective if groups want groupware," Hills observes. Successful Intranet groupware implementation gives employees the information they need, improves productivity, trust and creativity, and creates a flexible and adaptable organisation. "What differentiates a high-performing learning community from any corporate community is that the former has the 'knowledge ecology:' a dynamic and living web of computer-linked people with their experience, ideas, and expertise, that interact, feed and grow upon each other," according to George Por, author of "Corporate Knowledge Networks."

Future groupware developments include the increasing use of intelligent agents, Hills predicts. "Because of the effect of the learning curve, those who lag behind in adopting Intranet groupware and workflow may never catch up. Now's the time to start," Hills concludes.

In sum, "Intranet as Groupware" is a handy guide and reference for organisations evaluating the importance of Intranets and groupware; the checklists and case studies, along with the cited literature and online resources, round off the material perfectly. An online companion with updates and information about new products would have been a welcome addition.

With so much hype about intranets and groupware, it was amazing to find a book on these topics whose author: 1) writes from experience; 2) isn't a biased booster; and 3) balances technology issues with a first-rate understanding of the needs of people and organizations. If you want a hands-on, practical, step-by-step guide to understanding groupware and using an intranet to create it, I don't think you will be disappointed with this book. I recommend it highly and happily.

This is a classic that should be on everyone's reading list. I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt is the founder of the discipline of human ethology a science which studies human behavior with tools and theories used in the study of the behavior of other animals. In this book Eibl-Eibesfeldt takes on two emotions which many seem to identify as being exclusive to humanity - love and hate. The book examines these and other emotions across cultures as well as pointing to some nonhuman analogues.
Worthy detail is spent on the non verbal cues humans give to each other and how those cues have spanned cultures and history.
A wonderful offering by one of the most important minds of this century.
Highly recommended

In this book, Eibl-Eibesfeldt examines human gestures and postures and their effect on the viewer. He backs up his claims with anthropological and zoological observations.

If there is any one great book on evolutionary psychology, this is it. Eibl-Eibesfeldt is a genius.

Kovecses organizes the current thinking about metaphor and emotion well. -Metaphors that spring from the body being at the core of our emotional thought. I would recommend this to anyone interested in language, emotions, or metaphorical thinking. -It catches the overlap in needed fashion.

Zoltán Kövecses, coauthor of the case study on anger metaphors in English in Geoge Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, has spent almost two decades studying the ways we use to talk about the emotions (mostly using English examples) and has been one of the most prolific researchers in applying Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor approach to the domain of emotional experience. Although it has been 25 years since L & J's Metaphors We Live By was published, the amount of research on metaphor in other languages - especially non-Indo-European ones, has been quite small. It is refreshing, then, to see that Kövecses has taken a serious stab at dealing with the issues arising from some of the more important cross-cultural research done so far on emotion metaphor.

So, why would a cognitive linguist be interested in emotions? K. attempts an explanation in the preface. Here K. takes issue with the views of neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux sees "conscious feelings" as being of secondary importance. Understandably perhaps, emotions for a neurobiologist are primarily about brain states and bodily responses. K., however, feels that the secondary role given to conscious feelings by LeDoux stems from his use of an "unsatisfactory kind of linguistics" that sees words as refering literally to preexisting emotional states. One of K.'s main goals is to show how Cognitive Linguistics can give a deeper insight into the relationship between emotion and emotion language. A CL approach, in emphasizing the figurative side of human language, reveals how language is used to define and, at times, create emotional experience.

In this book, K. focusses on three main questions:
1. How do we talk about emotions in English and other languages?
2. What folk theories underly these ways of talking?
3. What is the relationship between folk and scientific theories?

Ch. 1 examines the role of figurative language in the conceptualization of emotion. K. asks "Do metaphors simply reflect a preexisting, literal reality, or do they actually create or constitute our emotional reality?" Why "boiling with anger", "be madly in love" etc? What exactly are "emotions"?

Ch. 2 summarizes the research (much of it is his own) on English emotion concepts and identifies a limited number of source domains. Ch. 3 is concerned with whether or not these metaphorical source domains are unique to the emotions.

Ch. 4 looks at the Event Structure of emotions - STATES ARE LOCATIONS, CHANGES ARE MOVEMENTS etc., while Ch. 5 applies Len Talmy's Force Dynamics to emotion.

Ch. 6 contrasts emotions and relationships. The former are conceptualized in terms of a master metaphor EMOTION IS FORCE and the latter are organized around a complex systems metaphor.

Ch. 7 deals with the relationship between folk and expert theories of emotion, while Ch. 8 and 9 look at universality and cultural variation. The final chapter attempts to reconcile a CL approach and a Social Constructionist approach to the meaning of emotion.

I personally found the last three chapters the most interesting - since, as far as I know, there has been little published in book form on the cultural aspects of metaphor. CL can obviously learn a lot from Anthropology - indeed it has to, if it wants to strengthen its claims about the embodiment of meaning and universals. K. uses examples from Chinese based on Brian King's unpublished doctoral dissertation on Chinese Emotion Concepts (which I found online as a downloadable pdf), Catherine Lutz's published fieldword on Ifaluk and a number of other sources. The cultural dimensions in particular make this book a fascinating one for anybody interested in the issues surrounding the universality and relativity of the human conceptual system.

As the title implies, this book is a great reference for someone who is looking for a guide to the syntax and usage of MPI. The book does not teach "parallel programming" and doesn't discuss other parallel programming tools which means that the nuts and bolts of MPI are all the more clearly presented and accessible. Furthermore, there are still plenty of examples which demonstrate the usage of the many MPI functions.

Another very valuable (and appreciated) aspect of the book is that *both* the C and FORTRAN prototypes are given when new MPI functions are presented (the C and FORTRAN implementations have slightly different forms).

Set up more as a reference than a tutorial, this book allows users with a very basic understanding of MPI to really take off up the learning curve

I too kept looking at the date, and still find it hard to believe it was written in the '70's. Todays conferencing systems still aspire to the functionalities that are described in this book.

Len Kawell attributed this book to being one of his key influences when he wrote Notes-11 at Digital, the precursor to the VAX Notes conferencing system. He left and became one of the founders of Iris Associates, the company that brought us Lotus Notes (also starring Tim Halvorsen and Ray Ozzie).

This book indeed is a part of history. After being told it had gone out of print, i've been trying to find a copy for 7 years. Thank god that the reprint became available! It was certainly worth waiting for.

While reading The Network Nation, I had to constantly refer to the publication date on the inside cover, 1978. Indeed, I was reading the revised edition dating back to 1993, but that didn't lessen my amazement. TNN was visionary when it was first published, but it is without question the defining document and perhaps standard reference work for the field of Computer Mediated Communication, or CMC. The authors highly major institutional and private applications of CMC and touch upon the impact of CMC, while addressing the legal and ethical issues intrinsic to the genre. They also provide a review of literature covering the field.

In Hiltz' and Turoff's future, the computer has become as common as the telephone, both at home and at work. Systems remove time and distance, hinting towards what is now referred to as the death of distance. These systems create a relaxed environment where thoughts are exchanged freely and easily, and relationships are formed, both online and off.

Hiltz and Turoff describe, among other things, the first virtual online community, which consisted of what we now call chat (synchronous communication), discussion boards (asynchronous), and customized news. Of course, this was created by the Office of Emergency Preparedness in the Executive Office of the President as they utilized technology to create what we would now call at virtual team in 1970. (For the records, the eventual system was called EMISARI, as it evolved from a Delphi conferencing system.)

We liked The Network Nation so much we named it a VB:Book-of-the-Week in our weekly publication VB:TechWatch, which covers the virtual community and knowledge management market spaces.

Enid Mumford's book is a must read for anyone interested in the potential and impact of socio-technical design. She takes us into a wonderful journey of work system advocates for dignity, participation and good working life for everyone included.

This book shows that beneath all the hype of management, there is a continuing need to establish management as a noble profession in which management can enhance human freedom, democracy and creativity. In this effort, Enid Mumford's voice has been significant over the last four decades. This book is an excellent testimony to this.

This is a rare book on design and research on design. You can learn from real experiences of real people, and see their struggle and anxiety. It shows that good research at the end must address somehow what it means to be a human being, and what constitutes good life for all of us.

Enid Mumford is a phenomenon. Throughout her long and active life as an academic and researcher she has championed the importance of the human participant in the design of organizational systems. She has demonstrated again and again that we can design better, more robust and efficient systems by involving all the stakeholders in the design process. This book is both a reprise of her work and at the same time a practical step by step guide on how to set about redesigning organizations. In this book Enid Mumford sets out a masterly step by step practical guide to redesigning systems to make use of new technology. The guide is based on a series of case studies representing her life's work, with each case contributing lessons on redesign. It is essential reading for all those preparing to engage in change using new technology - students as well as mangers.

A very well organized and articulate contribution to embodiment theory.See especially the entries by Jones.

This is must in the library of anyone who studies or practices new media art.

Smileys. You know what I'm talking about. Those little sideways faces composed on computer keyboards. Known also as "emoticons" they express a variety of emotions, feelings, sentiments, and sometimes represent well-known persons. They serve as a quick way to get messages across, whether good or bad, happy or sad. David Sanderson has complied over 650 of them in this handy pocket sized book to meet every occasion and need.

This printed collection of smileys is arranged topically by categories such as emotions, attitudes, persons and personalities, animals, hair styles, special interests, and occasions. Examples of actual smiley usage are provided throughout the book to help readers along. Definitions for recommended use are provided to help readers select the right smileys for the right occasions. Readers will have fun combing through the pages of this book to see what is available. And of course, everyone is free to compose their own smileys. All the ingredients are here!

This smiley guide is ideal for company office and network environments where people communicate with one another on a regular basis. It will also come in handy when composing e-mail to send to friends, relatives, and business contacts. A smiley can add a touch of humor and personality to any communication. Have you sent a smiley today? 8^D

This book was a kind of enlightment for me. At first I didn't get along with those funny charakters, but after I have read this entertaining book, I use them at every posibility.