Hi, this looks like a potentially interesting new book. It has just been
published, and I have not seen a copy myself.

cheers
martin

---

Inhabited Infomation Spaces: Living with your data

David N.Snowdon, Elizabeth F. Churchill & Emmanuel Frcon (eds)

http://www.iisbook.com/

Inhabited Information Spaces

Inhabited Information Spaces (IIS) are a means to fuse the representation
of information with a representation of the people using it thereby
helping to put the information in context. Many studies of co-operative
working have shown that even when co-operation is not explicit a
surprisingly large amount of work relies on the knowledge of what other
people are doing so that work can be co-ordinated. Therefore although
information visualisation systems are useful tools without a
representation of who is using the information and what they are doing
with it they are inadequate to support group work.

The field of (IIS) (sometimes referred to as Populated Information
Terrains, or PITs) overlaps that of Collaborative Virtual Environments
(CVEs) as CVEs are one of the preferred inmplementation techniques for
visualisation information in a collaborative way. However, IIS does not
necessarily imply the use of virtual environments technology - for
example, it is possible to imagine a system that enables co-located groups
to co-operatively work with information by using a dispaly projected onto
physical artefacts.

The key point is that the space used to represent the information is also
inhabited by the users of that information whether virtual (via avatars)
or by their normal physical presence. This book will consider all variants
on ISS, the technology required to make it work and the social and
psychological issues raised by such work.


_________________________________________________________________________

martin dodge

cyber geography research
centre for advanced spatial analysis, university college london
gower street, london, wc1e 6bt, united kingdom

email: [log in to unmask] (remove the nospam bit)

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk       http://www.cybergeography.org
__________________________________________________________________________