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IT and STS
Philip Doty and R. E. Wyllys
Assignment Title: Science and Technology Studies Article Evaluation.
Participation: Individual.
Format: Formal 750-1000 word essay in APA final manuscript format,
modified to adapt your paper for submission as a Webpage. This means
that quotations, citations, and references should adhere to the APA
guidelines, since these can be easily handled within HTML. On the other
hand, since Webpages do not correspond to printed pages, you should
use simply a title, instead of a title-page. In similar fashion, because
HTML makes it unduly difficult to do otherwise: instead of double-spacing
within paragraphs you should use single-spacing, but leave a 1-line
space between paragraphs; you need not, and preferably should not, indent
the first lines of paragraphs; you should not try to impose 1-inch margins
at left and right in normal text; and you should not use hanging indents
in the section containing your references.
Submission Method: Published as a Webpage in your iSchool account.
Maximum points: 5
Introduction: Information technology (IT) has had a large impact
on our culture and the way we conduct business. Through research, science
and technology studies (STS) address this impact and provide us insights
into the benefits and problems technology brings with it. Library and
information science (LIS) professionals are not only a part of the society
that feels that impact, but they are also often IT drivers who can either
help or hinder the application of IT. One IT tool that is available
to LIS professionals is the World-Wide Web. Experience with the use
of that tool through online Webpage publication is important to LIS
professionals. This assignment combines a professional evaluation of
an article addressing STS concerning IT with the experience of publishing
a Webpage on a Unix server.
(Note: In LIS 386.13 we use "STS" to abbreviate "science
and technology studies." "ST" should not be used to abbreviate
"science and technology," for which the usual abbreviation
is"S&T.")
Goals: The goals of this assignment are to:
- Help you to become acquainted with scholarly sources in the cultural
study of information technologies.
- Increase your understanding of cultural critiques of information
technologies with your existing knowledge of IT.
- Gain experience in writing an informed reaction to and assessment
of a chosen article.
- Gain experience publishing on the World-Wide Web using a Unix-based
server.
Tasks:
- Choose one article related to information technology published since
1985 in the following paper journals:
Daedalus (available electronically from Expanded Academic
ASAP and from Dow-Jones Interactive)
Information, Communication, and Society
Science, Technology, & Human Values (available electronically
from Expanded Academic ASAP and from Dow-Jones Interactive)
Social Problems (available electronically from Expanded Academic
ASAP and from Dow-Jones Interactive)
Social Studies of Science
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Technology and Culture (available electronically from Project
Muse)
Note: If you live where access to a library holding at
least one of these seven journals is difficult for geographical
reasons, you may wish to use the UT-Austin General Libraries service
of providing the full texts of selected journals online. (The journals
for this assignment that are available electronically are noted
above.) Go to the General Libraries Journals
Webpage, and click on "Search for a full text Journal."
(If you have not already installed in your browser a proxy-server
connection to allow you to use certain services of the General Libraries
that are restricted to current UT-Austin students and staff, you
will need to set up such a connection. To do so, go to How
Do I ... ? Access Library Resources from Off-campus (proxy server)
and, once you have it in your browser and have read it, click on
"Browser Setup Instructions" and follow the instructions
to which you will be led.)
-
Write a 750-1000 word essay evaluating the article and answering
the following questions:
a. In the light of the background class material on
STS and IT, and the material you have read for other class assignments,
what do you consider to be the author's major theoretical orientation?
Your answer should be about two (2) paragraphs long.
b. In your opinion, what is the single strongest part of the paper?
What is its single weakest part? Your answer should be about two
to three (2 -3) paragraphs long
c. What particular insight, observation, perspective, or approach
in the paper is of benefit to understanding IT in the context of
Library and Information Studies? Why? Your answer should be explicit
and specific, and you should explain your answer in the remaining
space in your essay.
-
Publish your paper on the World-Wide Web using your account on
the iSchool Unix server as follows:
a. The filename must be "sts.html" (without, of
course, the quotation marks). (Using this name is important for
reasons that are too technical to be worth detailing here.) You
need to be aware that in order to assign this name to the file containing
your paper, you may have to override certain default choices of
the program in which you prepare the file.
b. The paper must include either: (1) an image from the article
(an illustration, an important section, etc.) or (2) if for some
reason you are not able to make an image from the article, an image
of the copyright page of the journal. The image is to be embedded
in the text and should use either GIF or JPEG format. If the journal
is intended to be used only in the library, you might want make
a copy of the page and scan it to produce the image for your paper.
If the journal is found online as well as in print, you may make
a copy of the image or copyright page and put it into your paper.
Be sure to provide citations for the image and in your reference
list.
(Note: Do not supply the entire paper in image form. You
are to provide a text document in HTML format that contains at least
one image embedded in the text.)
c. You will need to create a new directory, named "public_html"
(without the quotes), in your account on the iSchool server. To
do this, you will need to log in to your iSchool directory and set
up the new directory. You may want to review Introduction
to the Unix Environment for help. The image is to be embedded
in the paper, so that it can be viewed next to the text of the paper;
however, because of the way HTML works, you will have to upload
both the document file, sts.html, and the image file to your
public_html directory.
d. When you have completed publishing your paper on the Web, send
an email message to the course
emailbox, informing the instructor and TAs of that fact. Be
sure to include the URL of your paper in your message.
Hints:
Using a Webpage-Preparation Program (Recommended)
A good, but not the only, way of getting your paper into HTML format
is to use Dreamweaver (which is available in the iSchool Information
Technology Laboratory; see also the very helpful IT Lab tutorial
on Deamweaver) or another Webpage-preparation program (e.g., Microsoft
FrontPage, which is part of the Microsoft Office Suite, or a freeware
program such as PageBuilder, which is available from Yahoo!).
Using Microsoft Word (Permitted, but not recommended)
There is an alternative to using a Webpage-preparation program. This
alternative is somewhat more complicated, and we do not recommend it
although we allow it. The alternative is to prepare your paper in Microsoft
Word and save it from Word as a Webpage, i.e., in HTML format. If you
do this, you should check the appearance of the resultant Webpage in
Internet Explorer or Netscape; if you need to make changes, you may
want to view the HTML source, which both Internet Explorer and Netscape
allow you to do, in order to see how your Webpage is set up.
Furthermore, whenever MS Word embeds an image in a document and then
saves the document in HTML format, Word insists on storing the image
file(s) in a subdirectory that it creates under the directory where
the document itself is stored; Word gives this subdirectory a name based
on the name of the document without an extension (i.e., without ".doc"
or "html"). For example, when you insert an image in your
paper and then save the paper as a Webpage named "sts.html",
Word will store the image in a subdirectory named "sts_files".
(Word also arbitrarily renames the images in an HTML document in sequence
as "image001.jpg" [or image001.gif, etc.], "image002.jpg",
etc.)
If you have used MS Word to prepare file "sts.html", then
when you upload this file to your public_html directory, you will also
have to create a subdirectory under the public_html directory and name
it "sts_files" (without, of course, the quotation marks).
Because Unix is case-sensitive, in naming this subdirectory you will
need to be careful to use uppercase and lowercase exactly as they appear
in the subdirectory on your computer. Finally, you will have to upload
the image files from the subdirectory named sts_files on your computer
to the subdirectory named sts_files under your public_html directory
on the iSchool server.
Tutorials Available
The Tutorial Junction of the iSchool Information Technology Lab provides
tutorials on Dreamweaver and HTML. Also useful and concise is A
Basic Set of HTML Tags.
Uploading Your Webpage
For uploading your Webpage, there are several possibilities. For Windows
users, we recommend your using either Netscape (click on Communicator
and then on Publish) or WS_FTP, for which there is a Tutorial Junction
tutorial available under WS_FTP.
If you are using a Macintosh, we suggest your using NiftyTelnet Secure
Shell (SSH) for Macintosh; see the tutorial on File-transfer
considerations for Macintosh users. These tutorials are best viewed
with a high-speed Internet connection (e.g., cablemodem, DSL) but, with
patience, can be downloaded and viewed through slower connections (e.g.,
28Kbps, 56Kbps).
For Windows, a freeware version of WS_FTP, known as WS_FTP Limited
Edition (WS_FTP LE), is available from a Website maintained by the vendor,
Ipswitch, Inc. For
Macintoshes, a freeware version of Nifty Telnet is available under the
name Nifty
Telnet 1.1 SSH.
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