Acta Informatica Pragensia, 2021 (vol. 10), issue 3

Editorial

What is Social Informatics from an International Perspective?

Vasja Vehovar, Zdenek Smutny, Alice R. Robbin

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 207-210 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1732705  

This editorial aims to summarise the special issue entitled “Perspectives of Social Informatics” that builds on the current international view of social informatics. The special issue consists of eight scientific articles and one book review.

Article

Social Informatics Experience: A Case Study on Learning and Teaching Sociological Basics in a Technical Context

Christa Weßel

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 211-235 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1703008  

To be able to play an active role in the design, creation and development of a networked society, students, scholars and practitioners need basic knowledge in social informatics. Students at a university of applied sciences attended a one-term seminar that consisted of eight two-day workshops. The students learned and used theories, concepts and methods of social informatics (SI), focusing on the sociological part of SI. The learning and teaching approach is grounded in competency-based learning. It enables students to explore a certain field. This is implemented by means of organization development, project-based learning, agile learning and teaching...

Czech and Slovak Educators' Online Teaching Experience: A Covid-19 Case Study

Jozef Hvorecký, Michal Beňo, Soňa Ferenčíková, Renata Janošcová, Jozef Šimúth

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 236-256 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1624762  

The surge in interest in online teaching increased not only due to the pandemic. It had been growing even before. The main objective of this study is therefore to explore how online teaching has changed. It addresses experience and opinions of educators of Czech and Slovak universities in the period from the first days of the COVID-19 lockdown (March 2020) till the peak of its second wave (May 2021). To examine the impact of disharmony, the authors investigated Czech and Slovak university educators’ activities and behaviour during their online teaching. A descriptive statistics approach was applied. A total of 172 educators participated in our...

Hateful and Other Negative Communication in Online Commenting Environments: Content, Structure and Targets

Vasja Vehovar, Dejan Jontes

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 257-274 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1654103  

Information and communication technologies are increasingly interacting with modern societies. One specific manifestation of this interaction concerns hateful and other negative comments in online environments. Various terms appear to denote this communication, from flaming, indecency and intolerance to hate speech. However, there is still a lack of an umbrella term that broadly captures this communication. Therefore, this paper introduces the concept of socially unacceptable discourse, which serves as the basis for an empirical study that evaluated online comments scraped from the Facebook pages of the three most-visited Slovenian news outlets. Machine-learning...

Discovery of Points of Interest with Different Granularities for Tour Recommendation Using a City Adaptive Clustering Framework

Junjie Sun, Tomoki Kinoue, Qiang Ma

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 275-288 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1613309  

Increasing demand for personalized tours for tourists travel in an urban area motivates more attention to points of interest (POI) and tour recommendation services. Recently, the granularity of POI has been discussed to provide more detailed information for tour planning, which supports both inside and outside routes that would improve tourists' travel experience. Such tour recommendation systems require a predefined POI database with different granularities, but existing POI discovery methods do not consider the granularity of POI well and treat all POIs as the same scale. On the other hand, the parameters also need to be tuned for different cities,...

Review

Social Informatics: 30 Years of Development of Russian Scientific School

Konstantin K. Kolin

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 289-300 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1503938  

The article deals with the history of the formation, current state and prospects for the development of social informatics as a current direction in science and education in Russia. The article offers mainly a personal view of the author, who has been involved in shaping social informatics in Russia for the last three decades. The article presents the distinctive features of the Russian scientific school of social informatics and its priorities in the formation of this field. The main directions of research in the field of social informatics in Russia in the context of the formation of the global information society are determined. Emphasis is placed...

The Russian Concept of Social Informatics in Light of Information Technology Innovation: A Systematic Review

Nina I. Melnikova, Olga A. Romanovskaya

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 301-332 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1729795  

The article presents a focused analysis of the Russian-language scientific literature of the first decades of the twenty-first century on the problems of the development of social informatics in Russia. The authors have shown that the multidimensionality of social informatics causes an increasing interdisciplinary research interest in the professional community and is divided into four directions. First, researchers refined the conceptual foundations of social informatics. The second direction is devoted to the study of information resources in their dynamics. The third direction considers and analyses digital traces and their use under the conditions...

The Praxeological Research Programme of Socio-Informatics – the Siegen School

Volker Wulf, Anne Weibert, Konstantin Aal, Sarah Rüller, Markus Rohde

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 333-348 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1713290  

This paper introduces the praxeologically grounded research programme on socio-informatics developed at the University of Siegen and the International Institute for Socio-Informatics in Germany. We outline our methodological framework of grounded design, guiding and binding together a variety of different engagements in practice which we call design case studies (DCS). While grounded design is applied to a broad variety of different areas, in this paper we deal specifically with our engagements in support of communities and political activists. To exemplify our approach, we present one DCS: It focuses on the participatory development of a computer...

Towards Re-Decentralized Future of the Web: Privacy, Security and Technology Development

Stanislav Vojíř, Jan Kučera

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 349-369 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1694937  

The World Wide Web (the Web) has become part of people’s daily lives. Although the Web, like the Internet itself, was designed as a decentralized network, hand in hand with the increase in its interactivity Web users gradually concentrated on a limited number of platforms. As a result, providers of these large international platforms have become centres of power that can easily influence users’ behaviour and what information they can access. This paper is based on an integrative literature review and its aim is to describe the development of the Web from its beginnings to the present. This development is viewed from the perspective of centralization...

Miscellanea

Book Review: Sozioinformatik – Von Menschen & Computern … und Bibern

Frank Wolff

Acta Informatica Pragensia 2021, 10(3), 370-371 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1561367  

A Book Review on Sozioinformatik – Von Menschen & Computern … und Bibern [Social Informatics – About People & Computers … and Beavers]. Christa Weßel (Rastede: Weidenborn Verlag), 2021, 197 pages, ISBN: 978-3947287079.