Introduction to This Special Issue on Text Entry for Mobile Computing

The four articles in this special issue of Human-Computer Interaction describe recent research in mobile text entry. Text entry research is by no means new. We can depict the progression of text entry research as occuring in two waves. The first was in the 1970s and early 1980s in response to the new role of electronic computers in automating office tasks, such as typing, word processing, and document management. Modeling ten-finger touch typing, categorizing typing errors, task analysis, and comparing document editing strategies are some of the themes in this early research. Exemplary references are the edited book by Cooper (1983) and Chapters 3-9 in The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction (Card, Moran, & Newell, 1983).