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This book seeks to advance our understanding of the relationship between information and human values by synthesizing the complementary but typically disconnected threads in the literature, reflecting on my 15 years of research on the relationship between information and human values, advancing our intellectual understanding of the key facets of this topic, and encouraging further research to continue exploring this important and timely research topic. The book begins with an explanation of what human values are and why they are important. Next, three distinct literatures on values, information, and technology are analyzed and synthesized, including the social psychology literature on human values, the information studies literature on the core values of librarianship, and the human-computer interaction literature on value-sensitive design. After that, three detailed case studies are presented based on reflections on a wide range of research studies. The first case study focuses on therole of human values in the design and use of educational simulations. The second case study focuses on the role of human values in the design and use of computational models. The final case study explores human values in communication via, about, or using information technology. The book concludes by laying out a values and design cycle for studying values in information and presenting an agenda for further research.
List of contents
Acknowledgments.- Why Human Values.- Approaches to Understanding Values.- Education and Human Values.- Technology and Human Values.- Communication and Human Values.- Synthesis: Reconsidering Information and Human Values.- A Research Agenda for Information and Human Values.- References.- Author Biography.
About the author
Kenneth R. Fleischmann is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in science and technology studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research has been funded by nine grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as funding from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and has been published in journals such as Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Communications of the ACM, Computer, and The Information Society. In 2012, his collaborative papers received the iConference Best Paper Award and the ASIS&T SIG-USE Best Paper Award.
