Articles I've read lately (May)

.

Just as last month, my 30-day promise for May was to "to read an average of 10 pages of academic articles every weekday and preferably at work rather than home". The result has been so-so for two different reasons:

- A deadline for an article made itself known and I had to exchange a lot of the readings on my literature/article reading list. I have little idea if I managed to reach the 220 pages that was the goal for May, but I presume I didn't (see below). I organized the texts-to-be-read into four neat weekly folders at the beginning of the month, but new stuff "jumped the queue" and I have "pushed forward" 2.5 out of 4 weekly folders. They sit on my desk and beg to be read in June instead...

- Bachelor's thesis season. In the first half of the month I had to read the five thesis that I'm the advisor of and in the second half of the month I instead had to read the ten thesis that I was the examiner of. These 30+ pages long documents have to be read quite carefully and with some attention to detail, and 15 thesis ≈ 500 pages of text that needed to be read urgently. This took a huge bite out of the time I had for reading stuff in May.

Taking this into account, I'm pleasantly surprised it turned out that I still managed to read 15 texts this month, although I believe the average length of the texts (articles) is low and I'm quite sure they together don't reach the 220 page-goal for the month of May. Some of the texts are purebred bona fide academic articles and others are of "mixed origin". The articles can for the most part easily be found through Google Scholar. Do note that I have added a "tag" below, "unpublished", referring to things that are not available on the web and most probably will never be (so don't bother looking for them...). Here are the 15 texts I read min May with a short comment about each of them:

• Blevis, E. (2007). Sustainable interaction design: invention & disposal, renewal & reuse. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 503-512). ACM. */ One of articles that kicked off the field of Sustainability and/in HCI. The articles summarizes and proposes a program for going forward. Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Eriksson, E. (2012 - unpublished). The oh so not written thesis - A jumble of UCD, sensemaking, organizational change and people. */ Written for an internal doctoral conference/colloquium at my department. I was the designated opponent. UCD = User-Centered Design.
• Hall, C. A., Balogh, S., & Murphy, D. J. (2009). What is the minimum EROI that a sustainable society must have? Energies, 2(1), 25-47. Molecular Diversity Preservation International. */ What Energy Return on Investment (EROI) (i.e. how much surplus energy) must our energy sources have in order for us to be able to maintain our civilization? The fact that we always go for the lowest-hanging fruit will turn out to become increasingly problematic in the (close) future as we have to switch from "better" to "worse" energy sources. 
• Hecker, T. E. (2007). The post-petroleum future of academic libraries. Journal of scholarly publishing, 38(4), 183-199. UT Press. */ What is the future of (academic) libraries and librarians after we are hit by peak oil and we start to abandon unsupportable technologies? "This article presents informed speculation about the place of academic libraries in the resource-compromised and ecologically devastated human condition of the not-distant future". Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Heinberg, R. (2010). What Is Sustainability? The Post Carbon Reader, 11-19. */ Concise, excellent primer/discussion about what constitutes "sustainability"; "A sustainable society [...] would be able to maintain itself for many centuries at least" (hint: it's all about the environment). Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Jesshope, C. R. (2006). The Microprocessor and Peak Oil - Discontinuities in our Civilisation. Inaugural lecture delivered on the accession of appointment as professor in Computer Science Engineering of the University of Amsterdam. Vossiupers UvA. */ A blatant case of false marketing; "peak oil" only used a rhetorical device to signify "big changes ahead". 
• Picha, M. (2012 - unpublished). Publishing and broadcasting - Editorial process structures and environmental impacts. */ Written for an internal doctoral conference/colloquium at my department. I was the designated opponent.
• Raghavan, B., & Ma, J. (2011). The energy and emergy of the internet. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (p. 9). ACM. */ Very interesting attempt to estimate "how much energy is required to construct, run, and maintain the Internet". Includes both "running costs" as well as the emergy - the energy that is "embodied" in the Internet's constituent parts (i.e. the energy needed to construct cell towers, routers, end devices etc.). Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Raghavan, B., Irwin, D., Albrecht, J., Ma, J., & Streed, A. (2012). An intermittent Internet architechture. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Future Energy Systems: Where Energy, Computing and Communication Meet (p. 5). ACM. */ Very interesting thought-experiment to "re-design the Internet for an energy-constrained future powered by diffuse, intermittent, and expensive power sources". Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Reeves, S. (2012). Envisioning Ubiquitous Computing. Proceedings of the 2012 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM. */ Extremely interesting article about how visions of compu-techno-futures are created and communicated - with a focus on ubiquitous computing. Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Rijnhout, L., & Schauer, T. (2009). Socially Sustainable Economic Degrowth. Workshop in the European Parliament, Brussels. */ Proceedings of a workshop with mixed quality of the contributions. I very much like the text by Joan Martinez Alier (Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona) and Francois Schneider's text (same university) was also interesting. These are people/authors I ought to look up!
• Thomas, D. (2009). Surviving Transition Sustainability in the 21 st Century. */ A not-very-good summary of many different things. Lacks purpose, clarity and sharpness; a forgettable text - I don't know where it is published or how it turned up in Google scholar. 
• Tomlinson, B., Silberman, M. S., Patterson, D., Pan, Y., & Blevis, E. (2012). Collapse Informatics: Augmenting the Sustainability & ICT4D Discourse in HCI. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM. */ Extremely interesting attempt to define a new subfield, "collapse informatics" - "the study, design, and development of sociotechnical systems in the abundant present for use in a future of scarcity". Most closely relates to this blog post.
• Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, 265(3), 94-104. New York. */ A classic that I re-read. Has been referred to almost 9000 times in Google scholar - a must-read for anyone interested in ubiquitous computing. Most closely relates to this blog text.
• Zapico, J. (in press). ICT and environmental sustainability, friend of foe? */ A book review that is written by a colleague of mine and that is to be published in the interdisciplinary open-access journal Information technologies & International development.

Here is the previous blog post with articles that I read in April.

.