• Computer Science Motivation
• Social Science Motivation
• Personnel
• Natural Ethics of Information Artifacts
• Sociology of Technology and Science
• Algebraic Semiotics
• Requirements Engineering
• Other Topics
• Brief Annotated Bibliography
• Courses

Computer systems are designed, built and used by people; they are components in larger socio-technical networks that include human beings; they are used for entertainment, finance, defense, transportation, shopping, dating, spamming, studying, etc. The success of a system is determined by the community of people who use it. Hence social and cognitive issues should be addressed in designing, building, evaluating and maintaining computer-based systems. Sadly, such issues are rarely taken sufficiently seriously, and as a result, many systems that are built cannot be used as intended, even more systems are abandoned before completion, cost and time overruns are more the rule than the exception, and user dissatisfaction is high. The lesson that computer systems are not purely technical objects seems very hard to learn, and very costly to ignore.

The social study of science and technology is a thriving endeavor with a large and diverse community of researchers, who ask how science and technology arises out of communities of scientists and technologists, and how this interacts with larger communities. Information technology seems a particularly interesting (and socially important) site for research of this kind, and conversely, computer science (and mathematics) can bring an increased precision to certain aspects of this exploration, including the structure of certain representations. One problem in which we have been particularly interested is to determine the value systems of communities of practice, and of the artifacts that they use.

• Joseph Goguen, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, UCSD; Director, Meaning and Computation Lab.
• Douglas "Fox" Harrell, Graduate Student in Computer Science and Engineering.
• John Phillips, Graduate Student in Visual Arts.
• Almira Karabeg, Visiting Scholar, from Dept. Computer Science, University of Oslo; 1998, and summers 1999, 2000.
• Eric Livingston, Visiting Scholar, from Dept. of Sociology, Armadale University, Armadale, Australia; from February to June 1997.

This project explores the hypothesis that information artifacts embody definite but implicit value systems. One case study concerns the value systems of web search engines, including the values of both engine owners and engine users. See The Ethics of Databases, a paper based on an invited panel presentation at the 1999 Annual Meeting, 29 October 1999, of the Society for Social Studies of Science; a separate abstract is available. A similar talk was also given 6 December 1999 at the Annenberg Center of the University of Southern California, as part of a seminar series entitled Confronting Convergence; the paper will appear in a book of the same title.

A second case study concerns the value system of mathematicians. See the slides for The Reality of Mathematical Objects, a lecture in the UCSD Science Studies Colloquium, 20 November 2000. This work applies discourse analysis (in the sense of sociolinguistics), cognitive linguistics, ethnomethodology and semiotics to mathematical discourse and its natural ethics. There is also a pdf version. Warning: You may have to change the orientation of the pages from landscape to seascape; also, this is just a sketch of a paper, with many details missing.

A third case study, now in an early stage, concerns the value systems of music. This project is also developing computational methods to identify structures in complex temporal systems, such as music, using ideas from cognitive science, and from complexity and information theories, as well as from cultural studies and sociology. See the webnote Structure and Values in Music for more detail.

A fourth case study, also at an early stage, concerns the value systems of email "spam" such as chain letters, bogus virus warnings, virus contaminated email, and solicitations for penny stocks, miracle cures, new religions, miracle inventments, etc.

A related project concerns aesthetic values in art. Here I have edited two volumes, entitled Art and the Brain (Imprint Academic, October 1999; ISBN 0-907-84545-2; also appeared as Journal of Consciousness Studies, volume 6, No. 6/7, June/July 1999), and Art and the Brain (Part 2) with Eric Myin, (Imprint Academic, September 2000; ISBN 0-907-845-126; also appeared as Journal of Consciousness Studies, volume 7, no. 8/9, 2000. My Editorial Introduction to the first volume (pages 5-14), and my introductory piece for the second, What is Art? (pages 7-15) are available, as is my review of Visual Space Perception: A Primer, by Maurice Hershenson (MIT 1998). I am also Editor in Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies; for a short overview of the field, see the article Consciousness Studies, in preparation for the Encyclopaedia of Science and Religion; a pdf version is also available.

An early study of values, briefly reported in Requirements Engineering as the Reconciliation of Technical and Social Issues (pages 165-199 of Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues, edited with Marina Jirotka, Academic Press, 1994), elicited the values of a small corporate recruitment firm, by analyzing stories and jokes that members told during breaks (for coffee, lunch, etc.), using techniques from discourse analysis (in the sense of sociolinguistics) and ethnomethodology. Although this concerned an organization rather than an information artifact, it did field test some concepts and methods that are important in our later studies.

Our approach to the sociology of technology and science is developed in some detail in the courses CSE 175, Social and Ethical Issues in Information Technology (formerly CSE 190B), and CSE 275, Social Aspects of Technology and Science. Here are the synopses for these two courses:

CSE 175: This course explores issues on the interface between information technology and society, with a special focus on ethical issues. Topics include ethical theory, privacy and security, spam, electronic commerce, the digital divide, open source software, medical informatics, bioinformatics, actor-network theory, ethnomethodology, and some neo-classical economics. For more detail, see the course outline.

CSE 275:This course explores issues on the interfaces among technology, science, and society, with a special focus on information technology. Topics include privacy, the internet and the web, spam, electronic commerce, chat rooms, ethics, requirements engineering, public policy, actor-network theory, Kuhn's theory of paradigms, post-modernism, neo-classical economics, virtual reality, and more. For more detail, see the course outline.

Semiotics is the study of signs and their meanings. This project attempts to make this area more systematic, rigorous and mathematical, as well as to do justice to its social foundations. Algebraic semiotics combines aspects of algebraic specification with social (especially ethnomethodological) semiotics. One major application area is user interface design. A particular case of this is the representation of mathematical proofs, as studied in the Tatami project, where our objective is to make proofs as understandable as possible. Many of these ideas have been implemented in the Kumo system using web technology plus some ideas from narratology (the systematic study of narrative - see Notes on Narrative.) A recent overview paper on the Kumo system, including the latest version of the Tatami conventions, which are its interface guidelines, can be found in Web-based Support for Cooperative Software Engineering, by Joseph Goguen and Kai Lin. In Annals of Software Engineering, volume 12, No. 1, pages 167-191, 2001, special issue on multimedia software engineering, edited by Jeffrey Tsai. A pdf version is also available.

The best source of detailed information on algebraic semiotics is the paper An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design. Basic material on user interface design can be found in the rather extensive class notes for the course CSE 271, along with motivation and some basics of algebraic semiotics, including the systematic measures for the quality of representations that it provides. Some further applications are informally discussed in the short webnote Information Visualization and Semiotic Morphisms. For some informal background, see the webnote Semiotic Morphisms and the paper On Notation. More information, including a bibliography and further links, can be found on the algebraic semiotics homepage.

This project takes the view that requirements engineering is the attempt to reconcile the technical and social aspects of large development projects. Some work in this area can be seen in the slides for the lecture Requirements Engineering and User Interface Design, by Joseph Goguen, given at the Requirements Engineering Workshop, Buenes Aires, Argentina, August 1999. Here is its abstract:

Some of the most challenging problems in requirements engineering concern the user interfaces to complex systems. For many systems, a large part of the effort goes into the user interface, which also plays a large role in user perceptions of system quality. However, this area raises difficult issues in cognition, the structure of interaction, and even ethics. Methods that can approach such problems include semiotics, ethnography and cognitive psychology, which help to put context into the analysis. The most novel techniques used include algebraic semiotics, which provides measures of structural quality, and literary theory and analysis, which view interactive graphics as "text." Two case studies for this approach are the interactive theorem prover Kumo, and web search engines. The most novel techniques used include algebraic semiotics, which provides measures of structural quality, and literary theory and analysis, which view interactive graphics as "text."

1. Review of Intellectual Impostures, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (second edition), in (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, No. 1, 365, 9 April 2004, page 26.
2. Semiotic Morphisms, by Joseph Goguen. An informal introduction to some basics of algebraic semiotics; for some formal details, see An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design, and for additional information, see CSE 271, a user interface design course using semiotics.
3. Towards a Social, Ethical Theory of Information, by Joseph Goguen, in Social Science Research, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work, edited by Geoffrey Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star and William Turner (Erlbaum, 1997) pages 27-56. A pdf version is also available.
4. Techniques for Requirements Elicitation, by Joseph Goguen and Charlotte Linde, in Proceedings, Requirements Engineering '93, edited by Stephen Fickas and Anthony Finkelstein, IEEE Computer Society, 1993, pages 152-164.
5. Requirements Engineering as the Reconciliation of Technical and Social Issues, in Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues, edited with Marina Jirotka (Academic Press, 1994) pages 165-199.
6. Social Issues in Requirements Engineering, by Joseph Goguen, in Proceedings, Requirements Engineering '93, edited by Stephen Fickas and Anthony Finkelstein, IEEE Computer Society, 1993, pages 194-195.
7. The Dry and the Wet, by Joseph Goguen, in Information Systems Concepts, edited by Eckhard Falkenberg, Colette Rolland and El-Sayed Nasr-El-Dein El-Sayed, Elsevier North-Holland, 1992, pages 1-17; proceedings of IFIP Working Group 8.1 Conference (Alexandria, Egypt).

Blending has been postulated by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner as a new fundamental cognitive operation, which combines conceptual spaces; it has been shown to play a fundamental role in the theory of metaphor. Mathematical foundations can be provided by the rather recent and very abstract field called "category theory" (it is not related to the area of psychology of the same name), by noting that sign systems together with semiotic morphisms form a category. Some modest additional axioms are satisfied, which leads to the notion of a 3/2-category. The appropriate notion of colimit for such categories has interesting properties that make it suitable for studying the blending sign systems and their morphisms. Some interesting generalizations and new properties of blending also arise out of this framework. These and other topics are explained in the basic paper, An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design. See also the webnotes Semiotic Morphisms and Information Visualization and Semiotic Morphisms for brief intuitive introductions to certain issues.

The notion of discourse type is a natural extension of the notion of grammar from the level of individual sentences to the level of discourse. A discourse unit has defined boundaries, and a describable internal structure; a discourse type characterizes the structure of a class of discourse units. The structures of several different discourse types have been studied in some detail, including planning, reasoning, and command and control. See the following papers for more detail (unfortunately, none of these are available online):

1. Structure of Planning Discourse, with Charlotte Linde, Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Volume 1, 1978, pages 219-251.
2. On the Independence of Discourse Structure and Semantic Domain, with Charlotte Linde, in Proceedings, 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Parasession on Topics in Interactive Discourse, (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) 1980, pages 35-37.
3. Reasoning and Natural Explanation, with Charlotte Linde and James Weiner, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Volume 19, 1983, pages 521-559.
4. Crew Communication as a Factor in Aviation Accidents, with Charlotte Linde and Miles Murphy, in Proceedings, 20th Annual Conference on Manual Control, Volume II, edited by E. James Hartzell and Sandra Hart, NASA Conference Publication 2341, 1984, pages 217-248.
5. Checklist Interruption and Resumption: A Linguistic Study, with Charlotte Linde, NASA Contractor Report 177460, NASA Contract NAS2-11052, July 1987; Structural Semantics Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).
6. Linguistic Measures for Evaluating Flight Simulation, with Charlotte Linde, NASA Contract NAS2-11052, July 1987; Structural Semantics Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).
7. Communication Training for Aircrews: A Review of Theoretical and Pragmatic Aspects of Training Program Design, with Charlotte Linde and Linda Devenish, NASA Contractor Report 177459, NASA Contract NAS2-12379, July 1987, Structural Semantics Final Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).
8. Aircrew Communicative Competence: Theoretical and Pragmatic Aspects of Training Design, with Charlotte Linde and Linda Devenish, NASA Contract NAS2-11052, 1987; Structural Semantics Technical Report to NASA, Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, California).

• Semiotics, Compassion and Value-Driven Design, by Joseph Goguen. Slides for keynote address at conference on Sociology of Informatics, Kyoto University, 13-14 December 2005; discusses semi-formal application of algebraic semiotics to software design, emphasizing the roles of values and compassion.
   
• Ontology, Society, and Ontotheology, in Proceedings, Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS'04); a postscript version is also available, as is the abstract. Marshalls ideas from philosophy, cognitive science, and sociology, in an attempt to discern some limitations of ontologies in the computer science technical sense. See also Workshop on Potential of Cognitive Semantics for Ontologies, for which this is was keynote address.
   
• Against Technological Determinism; a short essay defining technological determinism and pointing out its dangers; in CVS: Concurrency, Versioning and Systems, edited by Jon Phillips, and also in Scale, volume 1, no. 5, pages 19-22. The original html version is also available on the CSE 275 website.
   
• A blog, with notes on sociology of technology, logic, computer science, life, and all that. Note: The blog has partially recovered from a serious security bug in its underlying Pivot system: it is readable and writable, but RSS feeds and archiving do not work.
   
• Semiotics, Compassion and Value-Centered Design, by Joseph Goguen. Discusses the informal application of algebraic semiotics to large scale design problems, such as organizations, and brings in the role of compassion. Keynote lecture, in Proceedings of the Organizational Semiotics Workshop, University of Reading, UK, 11 - 12 July 2003. Slides for the talk and the original abstract are also available.
   
• Consciousness Studies, in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, vol 1, ed. J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen, Macmillan Reference, 2003, pp. 158-164. A pdf version is also available. This is a brief survey of the emerging field of consciousness studies (by request of the editor, this article contains more on religion than normally appears in my papers). Slides are available for a science-oriented lecture version of Consciousness Studies, given as part of a seminar for mental health professionals offered by the University of California at Berkeley Extension, 27 September 2003.
   
• Consciousness and the Decline of Cognitivism is a position paper for the conference Distributed Collective Practices, 6-9 February 2002 at UCSD; a pdf version is also available.
   
• Are Agents an Answer or a Question? by Joseph Goguen. Position paper on agent technology, to in Proceedings, JSAI-Synsophy International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design, 21-22 May 2001, Matsue, Japan; a compressed postscript version also available. Though not strictly a social science paper, it includes an analysis of the social and historical context of agent research, and a critique of agent technology based on the social behavior of real (human) agents.
   
• Slides for The Reality of Mathematical Objects, a lecture by Joseph Goguen for the UCSD Science Studies Colloquium, 20 November 2000; applies discourse analysis (in the sense of sociolinguistics), cognitive linguistics, ethnomethodology and semiotics to mathematical discourse and its natural ethics. There is also a pure postscript version. Warning: You may have to change the orientation of the pages from landscape to seascape; also, this is just a sketch of a paper, with many details missing.

  See also What is a Proof? by Joseph Goguen, an informal essay, written for user interface design course, CSE 271; originally from April 1997, with some more recent edits.
   

• Towards a Social, Ethical Theory of Information, by Joseph Goguen, in Social Science Research, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work, edited by Geoffrey Bowker, Les Gasser, Leigh Star and William Turner (Erlbaum, 1997) pages 27-56. A theory of information based on social interaction; it provides philosophical foundations for our approach to semiotics and requirements engineering. A pdf version is also available.
   
• The Ethics of Databases, by Joseph Goguen, paper based on an invited panel presentation at the 1999 Annual Meeting, 29 October 1999, of the Society for Social Studies of Science; a separate abstract is also available. Lecture also given 6 December 1999 at the Annenberg Center of the University of Southern California, in the Confronting Convergence Seminar series, and to appear in a book of the same title. This is a naturalistic study of the values embedded in web search engines.
   
• Notes on Narrative, by Joseph Goguen. A brief overview of some techniques for the analysis of stories, including summaries of the structural theory of narrative, and techniques for the extraction of value systems from stories. Written for use in UCSD computer science courses.
   
• Web-based Support for Cooperative Software Engineering, by Joseph Goguen and Kai Lin. In Annals of Software Engineering, volume 12, No. 1, pages 167-191, 2001, special issue on multimedia software engineering, edited by Jeffrey Tsai. An overview of the Tatami project and version 4 of the Kumo proof assistant and website generator, focusing on its design decisions, its use of multimedia web capabilities, and its integration of formal and informal methods for software development in a distributed cooperative environment.
   
• Techniques for Requirements Elicitation, by Joseph Goguen and Charlotte Linde, in Proceedings, Requirements Engineering '93, edited by Stephen Fickas and Anthony Finkelstein, IEEE Computer Society, 1993, pages 152-164. A critical comparison of methods for determining user requirements for systems, using a social science point of view, and including many social science methods.
   
• Social and Semiotic Analyses for Theorem Prover User Interface Design, by Joseph Goguen, Formal Aspects of Computing, volume 11, pages 272-301, 1999. Systematic justification of the style guidelines for the proof websites generated by (an older version of) the Kumo system, based on algebraic semiotics, narratology, cognitive science, etc.
   
• An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design, by Joseph Goguen, in Computation for Metaphor, Analogy and Agents, edited by Chrystopher Nehaniv, Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, volume 1562, 1999, pages 242-291. This is the basic paper on algebraic semiotics, with algebraic theory and many examples, especially from user interface design. A preliminary version appeared in Proceedings, Conf. on Computation for Metaphor, Analogy and Agents (Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, 6-10 April 1998) pages 54-79. There is also a pdf version.
   
• Information Visualization and Semiotic Morphisms, by Joseph Goguen. This webpaper is an intuitive discussion of how the notion of semiotic morphism from algebraic semiotics can help with scientific visualization and related problems. For some informal background, see the webnote Semiotic Morphisms and the paper On Notation.
   
• Visit the "world famous" UC San Diego Semiotic Zoo for an astonishing collection of exotic semiotic morphisms, each an example of bad design arising through failure to preserve some relevant structure. (Notes: (1) The zoo is still under construction, and one wing is currently closed for rennovation; (2) the zoo has won a "Creativity Award" from Art & Technology.)
   
• Text for keynote address Towards a Design Theory for Virtual Worlds: Algebraic Semiotics, with information visualization as a case study, by Joseph Goguen, given at the Virtual Worlds and Simulation Conference, Phoenix AZ, 10 January 2001. Sketches algebraic semiotics and some applications, especially scientific visualization and user interface design; the slides are also available (in compressed postscript). Warnings: Some figures shown in the lecture are not included, and you may have to change the orientation of the slides from landscape to seascape.
   
• Slides for the talk Poetry, Mechanism and Consciousness, by Joseph Goguen, presented at the conference Towards a Science of Consciousness (Tucson AZ, 27 April to 2 May 1998); see abstract 46 in Consciousness Research Abstracts (Imprint Academic, April 1998).
   
• Requirements Engineering as the Reconciliation of Technical and Social Issues, in Requirements Engineering: Social and Technical Issues, edited with Marina Jirotka (Academic Press, 1994) pages 165-199. This paper discusses situated abstract data types, which are related to our algebraic notion of sign system, and gives a number of suggestive examples. Of course, it also discusses the social context of requirements engineering in some depth.
   
• On Notation, by Joseph Goguen. Some basics of Peircean semiotics with easy applications to computer science and mathematics. Revised version of paper in TOOLS 10: Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, edited Boris Magnusson, Bertrand Meyer, Jean-Francois Perrot (Prentice-Hall, 1993) pages 5-10.
   
• Signs and Representations: Semiotics for User Interface Design, by Grant Malcolm and Joseph Goguen, in Visual Representations and Interpretations, edited by Ray Paton and Irene Nielson, Springer Wrokshops in Computing, 1998 (proceedings of a workshop held in Liverpool), pages 163-172. An informal introduction to algebraic semiotics with examples, including aspects of operating systems interfaces.
   
• Formality and Informality in Requirements Engineering, by Joseph Goguen, in Proceedings, Fourth International Conference on Requirements Engineering (IEEE Computer Society, April 1996) pages 102-108 (keynote address). An overview of our work in requirements capture and analysis.
   
• Social Issues in Requirements Engineering, by Joseph Goguen, in Proceedings, Requirements Engineering '93, edited by Stephen Fickas and Anthony Finkelstein, IEEE Computer Society, 1993, pages 194-195. A brief classification and enumeration of some of the social issues that arise in requirements engineering.
   
• The Dry and the Wet, by Joseph Goguen, in Information Systems Concepts, edited by Eckhard Falkenberg, Colette Rolland and El-Sayed Nasr-El-Dein El-Sayed, Elsevier North-Holland, 1992, pages 1-17; proceedings of IFIP Working Group 8.1 Conference (Alexandria, Egypt). A motivation and overview of some social techniques for requirements engineering.

• CSE 175: Social and Ethical Issues in Information Technology (formerly CSE 190B). Explores how social and technical issues interact in information technology, with an emphasis on ethical issues. This is an undergraduate version of CSE 275.
   
• CSE 275: Social Aspects of Technology and Science. Studies the complex relations between society, technology and science. This is a graduate version of CSE 175, with more on science and less on ethics.
   
• CSE 171: User Interface Design: Social and Technical Issues. Undergraduate level introduction to user interface design.
   
• CSE 271: User Interface Design: Social and Technical Issues. Graduate level introduction to user interface design, algebraic semiotics, blending, information visualization, and more.
   
• Website of CSE 87C, an undergraduate seminar on Computational Narratology.