Words, words, more words and acronyms

It's interesting to see that the issue of what the "field" of ICT4D, ICTD (or whatever ) is, has been the topic of several discussions on blogs and email lists. Chris Coward for example ( http://chriscoward.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/ict4d-ictd-or-what/ ) seems to feel new words or concepts are needed to describe what it is we research and do (although I'm not certain something along the lines of "underserved communities.." does justice to what we do, especially as this is essentially a telco/regulatory concept). I do agree with him, that donors and the private sector have probably dictated too much of what "ICT4D" is, with the consequence of not allowing for the study of certain issues, that are arguably important to society, but are deemed by the "field" to not be relevant as it isn't linked to development.
I had a similar back and forth discussion with one ICT reseracher-practitioner who felt a topic like "internet addiction" wasn't an appropriate issue to study in ICT4D, as it wasn't a priority for poverty reduction. I won't go into the intricacies of the arguments, but basically I feel that if society deems a topic relevant, characterised by significant media attention, as well as goverment, civil society and commercial interventions (as is the case of internet addiction, particularly in Asia), it is worthy of study. The ICT "4D" aspect would however mean that the research would need to be instrumental (no need to get into post-modern critiques of positivism, thank you....). However, I could see ICTD being interested in simply describing the phenomenon, without needing to find an instrumental purpose for the research.
Anyway, I continue my search for a post-ICT4D concept...

What's in a word continued

The results of the tag cloud below are interesting: they essentially show that "information" "communication" and "technology" are the most prominent words in the "common" field, which actually justifies using "ICT" as the principal concept. So much for trying to uncover new words to explain a field and concepts :)

Next step will be doing the same exercise with actual tags from the journals and then try to chart the evolution of language through time.

What's in a word

As I've been going through the DOAJ to look at common and popular concepts around information systems, computer science technology, openness etc.., some things were quite apparent

• computer science is by far the most important "technology" in the DOAJ, representing 141 journals in the "technology and engineering" section. the next largest section is "general technology" at 51 and the third "Electrical and Nuclear Engineering" (28 journals). Now this could of course be explained by the fact that fields related to the computer sciences were often involved with open access activities, but I still think this says something about the fact that computer science dominates discourse in the technology field.
• Within the social sciences, "media and communication" has a respectable 62 journals, and "library and information science" has 93, both of which are in the middle of the pack. By far the largest category in the social sciences is "Education", which likely has quite a few IT related topics.
  
• Even in the general technology and general social sciences section, numerous journals relate to information and communication (haven't checked if there is double counting though)

I was surprised by how prominent fields related to ICTs were, especially once you aggregate into a common multi-disciplinary field. There certainly doesn't seem to be any question that there is significant research going on, particularly in "Western" universities in the field. The question then becomes what language and which words can tie this field together, particularly of we didn't use the term "ICT". To get some inkling of this I took most of the titles from the above mentioned journals and but them in a tag cloud.

applied broadcasting business communication computer control culture cyberpsychology data development digital education ejournalist electronic emerging engineering informatics information innovation intelligence interaction international internet journal knowledge learning library literacy management mathematics media multimedia networks online open organizational practice problems property research science society software studies systems technical technology telecommunications transdiscipline virtual

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