Warning: Use of undefined constant user_level - assumed 'user_level' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /home/commons/public_html/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/ultimate_ga.php on line 524

A Guide to Important Sources for Further Research

Systems, Architectures, Complexity: Macro-Level Studies

• W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. New York, NY: Free Press,  2009.
• Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010.

Complex System Design: Modularity, Abstraction, Layers & Levels

• Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark, Design Rules, Vol. 1: The Power of Modularity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
• Herbert A. Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, no. 6 (December 12, 1962): 467–82.
• Parnas, D.L., P.C. Clements, and D.M. Weiss. “The Modular Structure of Complex Systems.” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-11, no. 3 (March 1985): 259–66. doi:10.1109/TSE.1985.232209.

Cognitive Artefacts, Semiotic Technologies

• Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998
• Steven Pinker, “The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, Supplement 2 (May 5, 2010): 8993–99.
• Itiel E. Dror and Stevan Harnad. “Offloading Cognition Onto Cognitive Technology.” In Cognition Distributed: How Cognitive Technology Extends Our Minds, edited by Itiel E. Dror and Stevan Harnad, 1-23. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2008.
• Colin Renfrew, “Mind and Matter: Cognitive Archaeology and External Symbolic Storage.” In Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, edited by Colin Renfrew, 1-6. Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1999.
• John C. Barrett, “The Archaeology of Mind: It’s Not What You Think.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal23, no. 01 (2013): 1–17.
• Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008).
  [Excerpts from the Forward by David Chalmers (attend especially to the comments in the last 3 pages of the Forward); Introduction and focus on Chapter 1 section 3: “Material Symbols” (especially the concept of “cognitive scaffolding” for language).]
• Carruthers, Peter. Language, Thought and Consciousness: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Clark, H., and Robert Kurzban. “Modularity in Cognition: Framing the Debate.” Psychological Review 113, no. 3 (2006): 628–47.

Media, Mediation, Socio-Technical Artefacts

• Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable.” In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, edited by John Law, 103-31. London, UK; New York, NY: Routledge, 1991.
• John Law, “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, 141-58. Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
• Regis Debray, Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.  Excerpts from Chaps. 1-2 and 7.
  • Debray usefully distinguishes (by redefinition) “communication” from “transmission” (over longer time spans). His more complex model of technical “mediation” involving many co-dependencies — technical, social, institutional, political — is close to Latour’s and Actor-Network Theory (and all systems theory models).

Affordances and Interfaces for Interaction 

• Janet H. Murray, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
• Apple, Inc. User Interface Design Principles for the Mac OS X: User’s “Mental Model”
  Note how the “official” design principles for Apple are mainly ways to “operationalize” and “productize” (procedures for implementing functions in specific instances) well-known design principles.

Information and Communication Theory (Signal to Sign)

• James Gleick,  The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2011).
• Luciano Floridi, “Semantic Conceptions of Information.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/information-semantic/.
• Korta, Kepa, and John Perry. “Pragmatics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2012., 2012. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/pragmatics/.
• Terrence W. Deacon, “What’s Missing from Theories of Information?” In Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics, edited by P. C. W Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, 146–69. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Computer System Design and Computational Thinking

• Peter J. Denning and Craig H. Martell. Great Principles of Computing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015.
• Denning, Peter J. “The Great Principles of Computing.” American Scientist, October, 2010.
• —–. “What Is Computation?” Ubiquity (ACM), August 26, 2010, and republished as “Opening Statement: What Is Computation?” The Computer Journal 55, no. 7 (July 1, 2012): 805-10.
• Rosenbloom, Paul S. “Computing and Computation.” ACM and The Computer Journal 55, no. 7 (July 1, 2012): 820-24.

From Computers to Metamedia Interfaces

• Michael S. Mahoney, “The Histories of Computing(s).” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30, no. 2 (June 2005). [The different research and development communities behind concepts and applications for computing.]
• Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Origin of Computing.” Scientific American 301, no. 3 (September 2009): 62–69.
• Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. Computer: A History Of The Information Machine. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014.
  [ Excerpts from Part 4 on the Personal Computer, Internet, and World Wide Web.]
• Peter J. Denning, “Design Thinking.” Communications of the ACM, 56, no. 12 (December 2013): 29-31 (parallel with Great Principles of Computing, chap. 10; skim and overview for this week).
• David A. Patterson, and John L. Hennessy. Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. 5th ed. Oxford, UK; Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2013. Excerpts from Chapter 1.
  [Excellent overview of important concepts for system architecture from PCs to tablets. For beginning computer engineering students, but accessible.]

Digital Media and Digitization

• Ron White and Timothy Downs. How Digital Photography Works. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Que Publishing, 2007.
  [ Excerpts that cover the basics of the digital camera and digital image creation, memory, and processing.]
• John Watkinson, Art of Digital Audio. 3rd ed. Oxford; Boston: Focal Press, 2000.
  [You won’t have to read this straight through, but read around to see if you can get the basic concepts of digital audio encoding and how/why it works. This is more detail that you will probably want or need, but very useful for demystifying the well-designed engineering processes behind all the digital audio we use every day! Written at the level of systems abstraction, the author is not concerned with the standards, formats, and commoditization of digital media artefacts that come at the next levels of implementation.]

The Internet and Web: Key Design Principles and Extensible Futures

• Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
• Vint Cerf, David Clark, et al. “A Brief History of the Internet.”
  Also in another format: “A Brief History of the Internet,” Internet Society.
  [An excellent history recounted by the major contributors to Internet architecture, design, and policy.]
• Barbara van Schewick, Internet Architecture and Innovation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.  Excerpt from Chap. 2, “Internet Design Principles.”
• David Clark, “The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols,” Originally published in Proceedings SIGCOMM ‘88, Computer Communication Review Vol. 18, No. 4, August 1988, pp. 106–114.
  [This is a very useful article on the design philosophy of Internet Protocols from the viewpoint of the engineers who worked on the standards, and accessible to non-engineering specialists.]
• David Clark, Karen Sollins, John Wroclawski, and Ted Faber. “Addressing Reality: An Architectural Response to Real-World Demands on the Evolving Internet.” In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Future Directions in Network Architecture, 247–57. FDNA ’03. New York, NY: ACM, 2003.
• The Internet Ecosystem (ISOC): The organizations and actors that contribute to the Internet.

De-Blackboxing and Design Case Studies

• Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Excerpt from introduction and chap. 1. Entire book is available in a Creative Commons version on the author’s site.