Encyclopedia of Human‐Computer Interaction

Citation

Calvert, P. (2007), "Encyclopedia of Human‐Computer Interaction", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 115-116. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710729173

Human‐computer interaction, commonly known as HCI, is a field of study that draws upon several parts of social, behavioural, and information science, as well as computing, electrical engineering, and even elements of medicine. It is the study of how humans communicate with computers and information systems. Over the last 15 years or so it has developed from a peripheral topic that was tolerated rather than embraced by computer scientists into a discipline in its own right. It is still rather dispersed, though, and as with other areas of study than lie on “borders”, such as information management, it can be hard to say what lies at its core. That is one good reason why an encyclopaedia could be very useful, for even those working within HCI will need to be reminded of what else is going on in other parts of the subject.

As with other Idea Group encyclopaedias it is truly an international work: more than 140 writers from 22 different countries have contributed 109 articles/chapters on topics within the HCI discipline. In addition the encyclopaedia assists learning by providing definitions of 830 technical and managerial terms. To aid further research there are more than 2,600 references pointing to additional information.

There are articles concerned with principles and concepts (e.g. the broad “socio‐technical systems” by Whitworth); the multi‐disciplinary nature of HCI (there are several articles that could be used to illustrate this point, but “Motivation in component‐based software development” by Chroust uses Maslow's hierarchy of needs); user interfaces (Garrett's article on the development of the PDA interface is worth reading); usability engineering and evaluation (e.g. Mandl on the automatic evaluation of interfaces on the internet); ethics, accessibility and adaptive technologies, online learning, security, e‐commerce, standards, cultural variation, and much more. Some articles are not so readily obvious in a reference work because they look to the future, and to what trends we might see in HCI. My personal favourite is “Information space” by Benyon, in which he makes the point that cognition does not just take place inside our heads, but that we are part of all that lies around us. The idea of information space studies is to look at urban areas, including gardens(!) for ideas on how humans navigate different types of space for best advantage. One area, which was once a considerable component but that seems to have disappeared from the HCI map, or is omitted only by this encyclopaedia, is the field of ergonomics. In contrast, an area that has grown in recent years is the use of rule‐based or statistics‐based automated systems for HCI. To an old‐timer like me this initially seems the antithesis of human‐computer interaction, but it is clear that the intention of research such as automatic interpretation of facial expressions is to try to make computers easier to use.

This work must compete with the two volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human‐Computer Interaction, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Berkshire Publishing, 2004). That was rather more like a traditional reference work, whereas this one isn't a source you would naturally turn to in order to discover selected information. Rather, it is a set of articles on a wide range of HCI topics that could be used as a first set of readings for a senior undergraduate or postgraduate course dealing with HCI. For that purpose it will be very useful and a natural choice for all university libraries, and to libraries the electronic book version is an alternative.