Search Foundations: Toward a Science of Technology-Mediated Experience
By (Author) Sachi Arafat
By (author) Elham Ashoori
MIT Press Ltd
MIT Press
12th February 2019
United States
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Coding theory and cryptology
020
Hardback
424
Width 152mm, Height 229mm
A call to redirect the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) toward the phenomenon of technology-mediated experience.In this book, Sachi Arafat and Elham Ashoori issue a call to reorient the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) away from search and related processes toward the more general phenomenon of technology-mediated experience. Technology-mediated experience accounts for an increasing proportion of human lived experience; the phenomenon of mediation gets at the heart of the human-machine relationship. Framing IR&S more broadly in this way generalizes its problems and perspectives, dovetailing them with those shared across disciplines dealing with socio-technical phenomena. This reorientation of IR&S requires imagining it as a new kind of science- a science of technology-mediated experience (STME). Arafat and Ashoori not only offer detailed analysis of the foundational concepts underlying IR&S and other technical disciplines but also boldly call for a radical, systematic appropriation of the sciences and humanities to create a better understanding of the human-technology relationship. Arafat and Ashoori discuss the notion of progress in IR&S and consider ideas of progress from the history and philosophy of science. They argue that progress in IR&S requires explicit linking between technical and nontechnical aspects of discourse. They develop a network of basic questions and present a discursive framework for addressing these questions. With this book, Arafat and Ashoori provide both a manifesto for the reimagining of their field and the foundations on which a reframed IR&S would rest.
Sachi Arafat is Assistant Professor of Data Science at King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. Elham Ashoori is a Senior Scientist at Conduent.