IEEE DEST 2008
IEEE Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies
26th-29th February 2008
Phitsanulok Thailand
Deadline for full paper submissions: October 14th, 2007
http://www.ieee-dest.curtin.edu.au/2008/tracks.php#trackE-humanities
eHumanities — Track Chairs: Marc Wilhelm Küster and Matthew Allen
Digital Ecosystem is defined as an open, loosely coupled, domain
clustered, demand-driven, self-organising collaborative environment,
where each species is proactive and responsive for its own benefit or
profit.
Digital eco-systems occur through the interactions between both human
and computer-based agents, operating in a manner that creates both
relationships of cooperation and conflict within the system as well as
the overall system itself. Analysis of the role of human perception,
engagement and expectation is critical, therefore, to understanding the
complexity of digital ecosystems as well as the operational dynamics of
any specific system. Furthermore, our capacity to build, maintain and
further develop viable digital ecosystems rests on clear, theoretical
and applied, understanding of the way in which humans and computers
interact with one another in digital, networked environments.
Put simply, the e-Humanities researchers will pursue a research agenda
that will explore the social, cultural, political and economic
determinants that constitute the foundational terrain within which
ecosystems exist. In doing so, they will also analyse the manner in
which, through human action within a digital ecosystem, human beliefs,
understandings and desires come to influence that system. Through
consideration of the results of human endeavours within digital
eco-systems, these researchers will also come to understand the ways in
which networked digital communications can enhance or, indeed, imperil
social and cultural development.
There are several research directions of the work in e-Humanities. The
first concerns the manner in which ‘intelligent’ interactive expertise
networks might be developed to solve the problems of knowledge-based
distributed collaboration between experts and those who draw on their
expertise. A ‘networks of interactive knowledge’ (NIKs) approach can be
usefully applied to education (both formal and informal), sustaining
professional competence, e-research, e-participation, e-government and
other forms of scholarly collaboration, as well as other situations in
which people need to collaborate through exchanges of partial knowledge
so that they might construct a collective expertise greater than the sum
of its individual parts. This is related to a second component, working
in standards-based, interoperable distributed service and resource
environments, e. g. service and resource networks or grids that allow
seamless integration on both tool and the resource side. The third
component of research concerns the broader relationship of technology
and society, with particular reference to the cultures and politics of
society’s adoption of, and adaption to, new forms of technologically
mediated communication and information sharing and of technology’s
requirements to adapt to existing cultural semiotic processes.
This research is largely being pursued through individual research
projects involving the development of theoretical knowledge to guide
further practical development, or deeper understandings of previous
technological developments, though in the future these projects can link
together to form a larger digital eco-system of systems. To foster such
cooperation is a major longterm goal of the track.
–
Marc Küster
FH Worms - University of Applied Sciences
Fachbereich Informatik/Telekommunikation
Tel.: +49 6241 509 118 Fax: +49 6241 509 221
Erenburgerstraße 19 * D-67549 Worms
kuester AT fh-worms DOT de
http://people.fh-worms.de/~kuester
