Syllabus


SECTION 1: THE SOCIAL SIDE OF INFORMATION

WEEK 1: Course Introduction

L1 - Tues, Jan 18

Chapters 1 and 2 in Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. 2000. The Social Life of Information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.  Read online: Chapter 1, Chapter 2

L2 - Thurs, Jan 20

Chapter 4 in Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. 2000. The Social Life of Information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Ackerman, Mark S. 2000. “The intellectual challenge of CSCW: the gap between social requirements and technical feasability.” Human Computer Interaction 15:179-203. PDF

WEEK 2: Social Implications of Information Technology: The Telephone

L3 - Tues, Jan 25

Chapters 1 and 3 in Fischer, C.S. (1992). America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley, University of California Press.

L4 - Thurs, Jan 27

Chapters 6, 7 and 8 in Fischer, C.S. (1992). America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley, University of California Press.

WEEK 3: Perspectives about Users and Technology: Determinism, SCOT, and ANT

L5 - Tues, Feb 1

Heilbroner, R. (1967) “Do Machines Make History?”. Technology and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 3, 335. PDF

Marx, Leo. 1997. "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept". Social Research, Vol. 64, No. 3. Note: the version in your reader is pretty messy, so we recommend you just read it online here:  LINK

Rosen, P. (1993) “The Social Construction of Mountain Bikes: Technology and Postmodernity in the Cycle Industry”. Social Studies of Science, Vol. 23, No. 3 479-513. PDF

L6 - Thurs, Feb 3

Johnson, Jim. 1988. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35:298-310. PDF

Law, John. 1992. "Notes on the Theory of the Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity". Center for Science Studies, Lancaster University. PDF

Mackenzie, Donald. 1996. Chapter 3. “Economic and Sociological Explanations of Technological Change” in Knowing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Assignment 1 Distributed

SECTION 2: CURRENT SOCIO-TECHNICAL PROBLEMS OF INFORMATION

WEEK 4: Guest Lecture Week (Coye and Ashwin away at iConference)

L7 - Tues, Feb 8

Guest Lecture by Char Booth: Finding library resources for I School Master's students

L8 - Thurs, Feb 10

Guest Lecture by Judd Antin

Antin, Judd and Elizabeth Churchill. Forthcoming. "Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective". PDF

Antin, Judd and Coye Cheshire. 2010. Readers and not Free-Riders: Reading as a Form of Participation in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. PDF

WEEK 5: Notification, Norms, and Social Implications of the Internet

L9 - Tues, Feb 15

Ryan, Dan. 2006. “Getting the Word Out: Notes on the Social Organization of Notification.” Sociological Theory 24:228-254. PDF

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Chapter 2. “Information Control and Personal Identity”, in Stigma. Prentice-Hall.

L10 - Thurs, Feb 17

DiMaggio, Paul, Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, and John P. Robinson. 2001. “Social Implications of the Internet.” Annual Review of Sociology 27:307-336. PDF

McKenna, Katelyn, and John A. Bargh. 2000. “Plan 9 From Cyberspace: The Implications of the Internet for Personality and Social Psychology.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 4. PDF

Warschauer, Mark and Morgan Ames. 2010. “Can One Laptop Per Child Save the World's Poor?”. Journal of International Affairs 64, 1: 33-51. PDF

Assignment 1 Due in Class

WEEK 6: Knowledge Transfer and Information Sharing

L11 - Tues, Feb 22

MacKenzie, Donald. 1996. “Chapter 10: Tacit Knowledge and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons.” in Knowing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Osterloh, Margit and Bruno S. Frey. 2000. “Motivation, Knowledge Transfer, and Organizational Forms.” Organization Science 11:538-550. PDF

L12 - Thurs, Feb 24

Kollock, Peter. 1999. “The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace.” Chapter 9 in Communities in Cyberspace, Kollock and Smith, eds.

Rafaeli, Sheizaf , and Daphne R. Raban. 2005. “Information sharing online: a research challenge.” International Journal of Knowledge and Learning 1:62-79. PDF

Cheshire, Coye and Judd Antin. 2009. "Order, Coordination and Uncertainty." eTrust: Forming Relationships in the Online World. Karen S. Cook, Chris Snijders, Vincent Buskins, Coye Cheshire (Eds.) Russell Sage Foundation. Pp. 266-291.

SECTION 3: EVALUATING SOCIO-TECHNICAL EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

WEEK 7: Qualitative Problems and Social Research

L13 - Tues, Mar 1

Creswell, John. 2003. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. (Chapter 1, 6, and 10).

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and lifetimes : the world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Prologue - Chapter 3)

L14 - Thurs, Mar 3

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and lifetimes : the world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Chapters 4- Epilogue)

Dourish, Paul. 2006. “Implications for Design.” Pp. 541-550 in Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI). Montreal, Canada. PDF

Assignment 2 Distributed

WEEK 8: Quantitative Problems and Social Research

L15 - Tues, Mar 8

Chapter 1 in Dooley, David. 2000. “The Logic of Social Research: ruling out rival hypotheses.” in Social Science Research Methods, edited by David Dooley: Prentice Hall.

Creswell, John. 2003. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. (Chapter  9).

L16 - Thurs, Mar 10

DiMaggio, P., Bart, B., (2008) “Make Money Surfing the Web? The Impact of Internet Use on the Earnings of U.S. Workers.” American Sociological Review, 73(2), 227-250. PDF

Kittur, Aniket, Ed H. Chi, bongwon Suh. 2008. "Crowdsourcing User Studies With Mechanical Turk" CHI 2007: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human-factors in Computing Systems. PDF

WEEK 9: Developing Your Problem and Argument

L17 - Tues, Mar 15

Becker, Howard. (1986) “Writing for Social Scientists” Chapters 3 and 8

L18 - Thurs, Mar 17

In-class activity.

Assignment 2 Due In Class

WEEK 10: SPRING BREAK

Tues, Mar 22 - No class

Thurs, Mar 24 - No class

SECTION 4: STRUCTURAL VIEWS OF INFORMATION USE AND ADOPTION

WEEK 11: Social Network Analysis and Information Technology – Theory and Examples

L19 - Tues, Mar 29

Chapters 1-2 in Wasserman, Stanley, and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” The American Journal of Sociology 78:1360-1380. PDF

L20 - Thurs, Mar 31

McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin and James Cook. 2001. “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 27, pp. 415-444. PDF

Mark, Noah.  1998. "Birds of a Feather Sing Together". Social Forces 77:2. PDF

Assignment 3 Distributed

WEEK 12: The Diffusion Process

L21 - Tues, Apr 5

Chapter 1 in Rogers, Everett M. 1995. Diffusion of Innovations. New York, NY: Free Press.

Geroski, P.A. 2000. “Models of technology diffusion”, Research Policy 29:603-625. PDF

L22 - Thurs, Apr 7

Gruhl et. Al. 2009. “Information Diffusion Through Blogspace”. PDF

Xiao , Yang and Adamic. 2010. “Diffusion Dynamics of Games on Online Social Networks.” PDF

SECTION 5: DECONSTRUCTING THE USER

WEEK 13: Identity and Reputation

L23 - Tues, Apr 12

Donath, Judith. 1998. “Identity and deception in the virtual community.” in Communities in Cyberspace, edited by P. Kollock and M. Smith. London: Routledge.

Chapters 1-2 in Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen. New York, NY: Touchstone.

L24 - Thurs, Apr 14

Ubois, Jeff. 2003. “Online Reputation Systems.” Pp. 1-33 in Release 1.0: www.edventure.com. PDF

Bolton, Gary E. and Axel Ockenfels. “The Limits of Trust in Economic Transactions: Investigations of Perfect Reputation Systems.” eTrust: Forming Relationships in the Online World. Karen S. Cook, Chris Snijders, Vincent Buskins, Coye Cheshire (Eds.) Russell Sage Foundation. Pp. 15-36.

Assignment 3 Due In Class

WEEK 14: Values and Technology

L25 - Tues, Apr 19

Nissenbaum, Helen. 2001. “How Computer Systems Embody Values”. IEEE Computer 34:3. PDF

Flanagan, Mary, Daniel C. Howe, and Helen Nissenbaum. 2008. “Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice.” In Information Technology and Moral Philosophy. Jeroen van den Hoven and John Weckert (Eds). Cambridge University Press. PDF

Mathew, Ashwin J. and Coye Cheshire. 2010. “The New Cartographers: Trust and Social Order within the Internet Infrastructure.” Presented at the 38th Telecommunications Policy Resesarch Conference. PDF

Peer Review Comments Due By Class Time (emailed/passed back to each groupmate, copied to Coye and Ashwin): please title your email "203 feedback for [name]".

L26 - Thurs, Apr 21

ROUNDTABLE PRESENTATIONS

WEEK 15: Building and Maintaining Trust in Information Systems

L27 - Tues, Apr 26

Marsh, Stephen and Mark R. Dibben. 2003. “The Role of Trust in Information Science and Technology.” Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37:465-498. PDF

Rieh, Soo Young and David Danielson. (2007). "Credibility: A multidisciplinary framework." B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 41, 307-364. Information Today, Inc. PDF

Fogg, et. al 2003. “How do users evaluate the credibility of Web sites?: a study with over 2,500 participants.” PDF

L28 - Thurs, Apr 28

Cheshire, Coye and Karen S. Cook. 2004. "The Emergence of Trust Networks Under Uncertainty: Implications for Internet Interactions." Analyse and Kritik, Vol 26. PDF

Cook, Karen S., Coye Cheshire, Alexandra Gerbasi and Brandy Aven. 2009. "Assessing Trustworthiness in Providers of Online Goods and Services." eTrust: Forming Relationships in the Online World. Karen S. Cook, Chris Snijders, Vincent Buskins, Coye Cheshire (Eds.) Russell Sage Foundation. Pp. 189-214.

WEEK 16: Course Wrap-Up, Review

L29 - Tues, May 3

L30 - Thurs, May 5

WEEK 17: Finals Week

Thursday, May 12 - FINAL PAPER DUE