You wrote:
> I wonder if Luiz' message is indicative of the recognition of unfavorab=
le sentiment towards quantitative studies and computation.=20
No it is not, but I'm speaking for myself. However, I understand that
the dichotomy quantitative/qualitative is only one among many that
ought to be bridged by the xmca community. Your concerns are
important. Within such an heterogeneous group of people conflicts of
perspective are somehow inevitable. In my perspective, simulation can
be used as an important tool in the study of communities, mainly if
its results can give us a better ground for action in the present.=20
Problems arise when their relationship is not taken into account. =20
When a model, what in certain sense is a qualitative structure, end up
structuring the boundaries of a community whose raison d'=EAtre is based
on it to the point of encapsulating the community itself from other
phenomena or other communities, I would say that the model will not be
ecologically valid for much longer (it is sustainable in the long
term, although it can be in the short one). The use of simulation, as
the use of any other tool, degenetates when it restricts the interests
of those who use it only on phenomena that can be simulated. The
hammer/nail relationship come to my mind. Give a hammer to a three
yeard old child and you will see how many other things are nails.=20
For example, the precursor of the SIGCHI, the ACM special group of
interest on Computer Human Interaction, was called SIGSOC, a SIG on
Social and Behavioral Computing. It is clear to me that the kind of
work you described you are doing is very close to what part of that
group was interested in the late sixties/seventies, at least in the
use of simulation. Unfortunately, the community involved in the
computing discipline narrowed down its broad scope found in the
sixties to a very narrow one in the seventies and eighties.=20
One of the reasons for a name change was to increase its appeal. It
worked for a while, and the field of Human Computer Interaction has
been growing since. However, in the process people with interests in
social science end up becoming minority in the field or just left. I
ask myself if the emergence of the field of Computer Supported
Cooperative Work is not a symptom of the concentration of the field of
human computer interaction on individual issues. I did a case study
comparing distinct documents discussing computing curricula
recommendations from the sixties to the nineties. Social issues
basically disappear from its body in 1978. Currently, social and
ethical issues are being reintroduced in computing science curricula,
but it has been a slow process. =20
Going back to "computing", a concept of computation that limits
computers to reckoning autonomous machines, in one way or another,
must have an effect on excluding from the concerns of computer and
information scientists and technologies social and cultural issues
alien to those normally considered in their own community. (Bur even
formal models of computing are being challenged. Peter Wegner, for
example, has developed the notion of interaction machine, showing that
computers have other characteristics than those encompassed by
traditional formal models of computation such as the universal turing
machine.)
The road toward rescuing some of the heterogeneous disciplinary needs
of computing and information technology is not an easy one. It seems
to me that many people at xmca have either a background, and agenda,
or only an interest in bridging the gaps between different
disciplines. Some of these gaps have been enlarged into oceans through
dichotomies such as the quantity/quality, mind/body,
individual/society, natural/artificial, .../etc. It is time reconsider
these (di)visions.
=20
Luiz