Eric T. Meyer

University of Texas at Austin | UT · School of Information

Power dynamics influence every aspect of scientific collaboration. Team power dynamics can be measured by team power level and team power hierarchy. Team power level is conceptualized as the average level of the possession of resources, expertise, or decision‐making authorities of a team. Team power hierarchy represents the vertical differences of...

Objective: Clinical data in the United States are highly fragmented, stored in numerous different databases, and are defined by service providers or clinical specialties rather than by individuals or their families. As a result, linking or aggregating a complete record for a patient is a major technological, legal, and operational challenge. One o...

Objective: While existing research by our team has demonstrated the feasibility of building a decentralized identity management application ("MediLinker") for health information, there are implementation issues related to testing such blockchain-based health applications in real-world clinical settings. In this study, we identified clinical, organ...

Scientific novelty drives the efforts to invent new vaccines and solutions during the pandemic. First‐time collaboration and international collaboration are two pivotal channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge, which might facilitate the generation of novel ideas. Our anal...

Teamwork is cooperative, participative and power sharing. In science of science, few studies have looked at the impact of team collaboration from the perspective of team power and hierarchy. This research examines in depth the relationships between team power and team success in the field of Computer Science (CS) using the DBLP dataset. Team power...

Objective Healthcare systems suffer from a lack of interoperability that creates “data silos,” causing patient linkage and data sharing problems. Blockchain technology’s unique architecture provides individuals greater control over their information and may help address some of the problems related to health data. A multidisciplinary team designed...

Scientific novelty is important during the pandemic due to its critical role in generating new vaccines. Parachuting collaboration and international collaboration are two crucial channels to expand teams' search activities for a broader scope of resources required to address the global challenge. Our analysis of 58,728 coronavirus papers suggests t...

Technical report documenting the potential of automation in NHS Primary Care. This report is the most thorough and detailed documentation of the entire span of the project. It contains many details and findings that we did not have space for in a traditional journal publication.

Objective To identify the extent to which administrative tasks carried out by primary care staff in general practice could be automated. Design A mixed-method design including ethnographic case studies, focus groups, interviews and an online survey of automation experts. Setting Three urban and three rural general practice health centres in Engla...

In the Introduction to this special issue on the Social Informatics of Knowledge, the editors of the issue reflect on the history of the term “social informatics” and how the articles in this issue both reflect and depart from the original concept. We examine how social informatics researchers have studied knowledge, computerization, and the workpl...

This panel will present and discuss the issues surrounding deception, misinformation, and disinformation using a social informatics perspective. The panel is sponsored by ASIST SIG‐SI.

While talk of "Big Data" is now prevalent in many sectors, there are still relatively few examples of Big Data being used to shape public policy. This article reports an international study of Big Data for policy initiatives to understand the role played by data-driven approaches in the policy process. Drawing on evidence (including policy analysis...

Background: Recent advances in technology have reopened an old debate on which sectors will be most affected by automation. This debate is ill-served by the current lack of detailed data on the exact capabilities of new machines and how they are influencing work. While recent debates about the future of jobs have focused on whether or not they are a...

Automation of jobs is discussed as a threat to many job occupations, but in the UK healthcare sector many view technology and automation as a way to save a threatened system. However, existing quantitative models that rely on occupation-level measures of the likelihood of automation suggest that few healthcare occupations are susceptible to automat...

It is clear from the expanding literature that blockchain technology is a trend potentially on the brink of revolutionizing the public and private sectors. There have been conferences, books, white papers, start‐ups, and numerous back‐channel discussions on ways blockchain technology can address seemingly endless processes, and it is on the radar o...

A key outcome of the HUMANE project is a series of policy roadmaps which provide guidance for improving Human-Machine Networks (HMNs) in different social domains. In order to achieve this, we need to foresee future trends in these social domains, examine the broader impact and implications of HMNs, the technical and regulatory challenges, and set t...

A key outcome of the HUMANE project is a series of policy roadmaps which show a clear path for improving Human‐Machine Networks (HMNs) in different social domains. In order to achieve this, we need to examine the broader impact and implications of HMNs in these social domains, the technical and regulatory challenges, and policy interventions that c...

An important goal in the HUMANE project is to set out the implications for future thinking and policy making in Human‐ Machine Networks (HMN). In this deliverable, we explore relevant characteristics and implications of HMNs in a number of innovative domains that have high potential for bringing fundamental social changes: the sharing economy, eHea...

In this article, we examine the growth of the Internet as a research topic across the disciplines and the embedding of the Internet into the very fabric of research. While this is a trend that ‘everyone knows’, prior to this study, no work had quantified the extent to which this common sense knowledge was true or how the embedding actually took pla...

In this paper we outline an initial typology and framework for the purpose of profiling human-machine networks, that is, collective structures where humans and machines interact to produce synergistic effects. Profiling a human-machine network along the dimensions of the typology is intended to facilitate access to relevant design knowledge and exp...

Big data has been widely promoted across disciplines and sectors for its potential to enhance lives and promote knowledge discovery. However, challenges arise at all stages of the data lifecycle due to the complexity of interactions between data and the contexts within which they are collected and managed, which has implications for interpretations...

In 2015, in cooperation with ProQuest, Jisc commissioned this study of the Impacts of Digital Collections focused on two particular collections: Early English Books Online (EEBO) and House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP). These two collections are just a fraction of the number of collections that Jisc has purchased on behalf of its member in...

In the current hyper-connected era, modern Information and Communication Technology systems form sophisticated networks where not only do people interact with other people, but also machines take an increasingly visible and participatory role. Such human-machine networks (HMNs) are embedded in the daily lives of people, both or personal and profess...

In this essay, the role of human expertise in the face of technological advance is discussed. There are many examples of technology that have become sufficiently advanced that the previous need to develop expert-level skills before being able to perform at a high level is either vastly reduced or eliminated. For instance, digital cameras can create...

This paper is the product of a workshop that brought together practitioners, researchers, and data experts to discuss how big data is becoming a resource for positive social change in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We include in our definition of big data sources such as social media data, mobile phone use records, digitally mediated tra...

The web encourages the constant creation and distribution of large amounts of information; it is also a valuable resource for understanding human behavior and communication. To take full advantage of the web as a research resource that extends beyond the consideration of snapshots of the present, however, it is necessary to begin to take web archiv...

Although the terminology of Big Data has so far gained little traction in economics, the availability of unprecedentedly rich datasets and the need for new approaches – both epistemological and computational – to deal with them is an emerging issue for the discipline. Using interviews conducted with a cross-section of economists, this paper examine...

This paper maps the national UK web presence on the basis of an analysis of the .uk domain from 1996 to 2010. It reviews previous attempts to use web archives to understand national web domains and describes the dataset. Next, it presents an analysis of the .uk domain, including the overall number of links in the archive and changes in the link den...

One and a half decades after the publication of Kling's (1999) article explaining "What is social informatics and why does it matter?", we find ourselves further along the road in terms of understandings of socio-technical configurations. In this article, however, I argue that social informatics is much more visible in the gray non-journal literatu...

To determine actual attitudes and practices of those in the Future Internet industry towards user involvement, delegates at the 2012 FIA participated in a focus group and a survey. Continuous user involvement is highly valued and expected to maximise the societal benefits of FI applica-tions. However, just over half of the FI projects apply a user-...

The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) was established in 1999, as a collaborative project involving the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, the commercial publisher ProQuest and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The aim of the Text Creation Partnership was to create fully searchable...

The paper studies the transition to ICT‐based support systems for scientific research. These systems currently attempt the transition from the project stage to the more permanent stage of an infrastructure. The transition leads to several challenges, including in the area of establishing adequate governance regimes, which not all projects master su...

Our approach in this paper is to understand photography not as representation, technology, or object, but as the agency that takes place when a set of technologies, meanings, uses and practices align. The photographic object, in this sense, is nothing but the materialization of a series of assemblages, and the photographic object also enables or co...

Purpose – Webometric studies, using hyperlinks between websites as the basic data type, have been used to assess academic networks, the “impact factor” of academic communications and to analyse the impact of online digital libraries, and the impact of digital scholarly images. This study aims to be the first to use these methods to trace the impact...

The Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) project investigated the uses and impacts of digital research – what others have called e-Research or e-Science – from the perspective of the social sciences. The study examined the factors shaping new approaches to digital research across the sciences and humanities as well as its implications for the nature and...

There are many societal concerns that emerge as a consequence of Future Internet (FI) research and development. A survey identified six key social and economic issues deemed most relevant to European FI projects. During a SESERV-organized workshop, experts in Future Internet technology engaged with social scientists (including economists), policy e...

We argue that high-resolution naturalistic digital images of physical objects are oriented to in a very different manner than other visual representations such as 'inscriptions' which are manufactured by black-box devices in order to transform phenomena into diagrams, or 'rendering practices' where scientists visually transform the meaning of objec...

In recent years, many studies have highlighted the changing nature of scholarly research, reflecting the new digital tools and techniques that have been developed. But researcher uptake of these tools is strongly influenced by existing information behaviour, itself affected by a number of factors, particularly discipline. This article outlines find...

In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and physical scientists find, use, and disseminate information in a variety of ways. This report examines information practices...

With the evolution of the Internet from a controlled research network to a worldwide social and economic platform, the initial assumptions regarding stakeholder cooperative behavior are no longer valid. Conflicts have emerged in situations where there are opposing interests. Previous work in the literature has termed these conflicts tussles. This a...

In this paper, we examine transformations that have taken place in e-Research, and address the potential for additional transformations as e-Research develops and matures. The notion of a transformation in e-Research can operate on many levels: transformations in the tools used to conduct research, transformations in projects that enable new types...

e-Social Science initiatives have been launched around the world, but little is known about their visibility and take-up across the disciplines. This paper reports on the findings of a Web-based survey designed to determine whether or not a sizeable proportion of social scientists are aware of e-research initiatives and identify the characteristics...

In this report, the authors consider the possible future uses of web archives. This report is structured first, to engage in some speculative thought about the possible futures of the web as an exercise in prompting us to think about what we need to do now in order to make sure that we can reliably and fruitfully use archives of the web in the futu...

Digitised materials representing the world’s cultural heritage are part of a growing trend towards a world in which knowledge is digitally stored, available on demand, and constantly growing. As the world becomes digital and the globally connected “digital brain” holds the shared knowledge of the world, the materials of the past need to be included...

Researchers in the humanities adopt a wide variety of approaches to their research. Their work tends to focus on texts and images, but they use and also create a wide range of information resources, in print, manuscript and digital forms. Like other researchers, they face multiple demands on their time, and so they find the ease and speed of access...

This panel is comprised of international scholars studying how the information practices of researchers have been changing both the habits of individuals and the research directions of disciplines as research is increasingly reliant on digital tools and data. The panel will include short presentations, followed by substantial time for discussion an...

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population now visit an online community or blogging site and thesector now accounts for almost 10% of all Internet time. A quarter of a million users sign up to socialnetworking sites every day worldwide and a third of those who have a profile on a social networkupdate it daily. Participation and privacy are crit...

This is a review of Martin Hands, 'Making Digital Cultures: Access, Interactivity, and Authenticity', (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited.Martin Hand, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University in Canada, tackles a continuing problem familiar to readers of this journal, namely the relationship among people, o...

This report, which should be read in conjunction with its companion, “Researcher Engagement with Web Archives: State of the Art” (Dougherty, et al., 2010), looks beyond the current state of web archives, and the uses made of them, to expand on some of the challenges identified there, and to point out some of the important opportunities which exist...

In this report, we summarize the state of the art of web archiving in relationship to researchers and research needs. This is a different focus than much of the earlier work in this area, including the JISC PoWR report which focused on institutional strategies for archiving web resources (JISC, 2008). It is important to note that this report focuse...

This chapter examines how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can transform the work of social scientists and how social scientists can influence e-Research capabilities and outcomes. It also considers how e-Infrastructure can best support the social sciences and the extent to which innovations in research-centered computational netwo...

This chapter examines the challenges faced by academic libraries and archives as e-Research and digital scholarship mature. In particular, it discusses the tensions between open access and intellectual property rights, the way informal scholarly communications are increasingly being made public on the Internet, and the transition toward decentraliz...

This report for the European Commission evaluates if/how the European society had become an Information society during the first decade of the new millenium. At that time, "information society" had also been the name of the related EU programs and the DG. The report was, therefore, part of the evaluation of these efforts. It can be read publicly un...

e-Research initiatives have been launched around the world, but have they captured the imagination of researchers across the disciplines? This paper reports on a web-based survey designed to gauge awareness of and support for e-Research initiatives. Early adoption and interest in e-Research practices represent a wide range of methodological traditi...

Are advances in ICTs enabling positive transformations in academic research practices? This paper explores key themes emerging from a 2008 survey of researchers aimed at identifying use and non-use of advanced ICTs for research. Deterministic perspectives on e-Research suggest that new e-infrastructures will reshape research in predictable ways, su...

e-Research is a rapidly growing research area, both in terms of publications and in terms of funding. In this article we argue that it is necessary to reconceptualize the ways in which we seek to measure and understand e-Research by developing a sociology of knowledge based on our understanding of how science has been transformed historically and s...

This article examines the shift to online knowledge in research. In recent years there has been a major transformation in how formal and informal science communication is disseminated by electronic means. At the same time, researchers’ practices in accessing knowledge and information have changed, particularly in the use of search engines and digit...

The experience of presence is at the core of everyday life and interactions. How we experience and make sense of the world plays a crucial role for how we think about and act upon it. Introducing new technologies like brain-computer interfaces and mixed reality applications to change, augment, substitute, or reconfigure this process is therefore bo...

This essay examines how researchers gain access to knowledge at a time when scholarly communication and materials are increasingly moving online. This topic has so far mainly been discussed in terms of journal publication and readership. Here we take a broader view, including a variety of areas where knowledge production and dissemination is broade...

This paper uses traditional scientometric and also webometric measures to gauge the prominence of e-Research across the globe. We have used the same keywords for both samples in an analysis of e-Research, using a wide variety of labels to capture the field as widely as possible. Thus we are able to compare scientometrics (broadly speaking, publicat...

This paper discusses some of the issues that arise when small scientific projects make the transition to becoming part of larger scientific collaborations, as seen from a social informatics perspective. The data for the paper is drawn from two cases: a systematic study of a humpback whale research project involving federating data about the populat...

Although considerable effort and expense has gone into digitising content in the humanities, there is a lack of data about the actual uses and impacts these digitised resources are having on scholarship and on the public. In this paper, we report on a study completed in 2009 that examined five digitisation projects using a variety of measures to as...

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) plays an important role in the survival, differentiation, and outgrowth of select peripheral and central neurons throughout adulthood. Growing evidence suggests that BDNF is involved in the pathophysiology of mood disorders. Ten single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across the BDNF gene were genotyped in a...

This paper examines the impact of e-Research, particularly in the social sciences, by doing a meta-analysis of existing sources and complementing this with new data. Sources include two online surveys of social scientists which gauged uses and awareness of e-Research tools, reports from national e-Social Science initiatives, and scientometric analy...

In this chapter, the author examines a single computerization movement: digital photography. During the period 1991-2004, the technology in digital cameras was being refined by manufacturers and the advantages and limitations of digital cameras were discussed widely in the popular and trade-oriented media. The author explores this period of technol...

Digital photography is a relatively new topic for scholarly study in the area of computer mediated communication. Photographic technologies were only first computerized in the 1990s, but have rapidly supplanted older film technologies for a majority of professional uses. Digital photography has not simply substituted silicon chips for film, however...

Abstract During the late 1990s, photography moved from being a primarily analogue medium to being an almost entirely digital medium. The development of digital cameras and software for working with photographs has led to the wholesale computerization of photography in many different domains. This paper reports on the findings of a study of the soci...

Objectives: To assess genetic vulnerability factors related to comorbid mood disorder and alcohol dependence.Methods: We analyzed family studies of bipolar affective disorder for familiality of comorbid alcohol dependence. We then analyzed family studies of alcohol dependence for familiality (and genetic linkage characteristics) of comorbid depress...

The Socio-Technical Interaction Network (STIN) strategy for social informatics research was published late in Rob Kling’s life, and as a result, he did not have time to pursue its continued development. This paper aims to summarize existing work on STINs, identify key themes, strengths, weaknesses and limitations, and to suggest trajectories for th...

Electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of hemispheric asymmetry in anterior brain activity have been related to a variety of indices of psychopathology and emotionality. However, little is known about patterns of frontal asymmetry in alcohol-dependent (AD) samples. It is also unclear whether psychiatric comorbidity in AD subjects accounts for addit...

This paper defines and extends Kling’s concept of communication regimes by identifying the concept’s origins and offering a definition that will allow further research using this framework. The terminology used here originates in political science; in translating these concepts for information science, however, much of the original meaning can be m...

Photoblogging, photo-sharing, and other internet activities geared toward enabling photography as a central purpose have been growing in number and popularity in the last several years. Photographs have been part of websites since the beginning of the graphical internet era ushered in by the Netscape browser. However, only recently have sites appea...