This paper is an invitation to carry out science and engineering for a class of socio-technical systems where individuals — who may be human or artificial entities — engage in purposeful collective interactions within a shared web-mediated social space. We put forward a characterization of these systems and introduce some conceptual distinctions that may help to plot the work ahead. In particul...

Although known item searching for music can be dealt with by searching metadata using existing text search techniques, human subjectivity and variability within the music itself make it very difficult to search for unknown items. This paper examines these problems within the context of text retrieval and music information retrieval. The focus is on ascertaining a relationship between music rele...

The Internet is rapidly transforming a range of human activities; socio-cognitive theory assumes that engagement in transformed activities, over time, transforms human cognition. Four hundred and six college students completed four modified cognitive assessment system subtests, each assessing one dimension of the PASS model of cognitive processing (i.e., planning, attention, simultaneous and su...

Online knowledge building communities (OKBC) reunite participants engaged in collaborative discourse. OKBCs can be made „smart“ by adding tools that predict how likely an OKBC is to integrate newcomers in existing dialogues and socio-cognitive structures. Starting from Bakhtin’s dialogical approach and polyphony theory, and building on the concept of interanimation of voices, this study explore...

Purpose — Science is subject to a normative structure that includes how the contributions and interactions between scientists are rewarded. Authorship and citations have been the key elements within the reward system of science, whereas acknowledgements, despite being a well-established element in scholarly communication, have not received the same attention. This paper aims to put forward the ...

There are different approaches to knowledge management. So, a knowledge management system could be analyzed from different viewpoints. Usually the term a “knowledge management system” is used as a synonym for the information and communication tools, and rarely is defined from a social or sociotechnical perspective. This paper acknowledges the socio-technical approach to knowledge management sys...

Traditional approaches to hazard analysis and safety-related risk management are based on an accident model that focuses on failure events in static engineering designs and linear notions of causality. They are therefore limited in their ability to include complex human decision-making, software errors, system accidents (versus component failure accidents), and organizational risk factors in th...