Wonderful to have an opportunity to catch up with Professor Noriko Hara, currently a professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and the Director of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. I met her when she was a graduate student of Rob Kling’s, a former colleague of mine when I was at the Public Policy Research Organization (PPRO) at the University of California, Irvine.
Rob was an outstanding computer scientist and self-taught sociologist, who championed the concept of social informatics – what he sometimes called the social life of computing. Rob left UC Irvine after 23 years to direct an interdisciplinary he called the Center for Social Informatics (CSI) at Indiana University, Bloomington. He was clearly one of the founders of social analyses of computing, who brilliantly combined his deep technical background in computer sciences with his love and command of social theory and research. He died at the age of 58 in 2003, leading the Luddy School of Informatics to rename his center as ‘The Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics’.
Noriko and her colleagues invited me to speak at Rob’s Center in 2019. Since her doctorate, she became a professor at the Luddy School and Chair of the Luddy Information and Library Sciences Department. Most recently she took on the director’s role in Rob’s social informatics center at Indiana University. In this role, I am sure she will carry on with Rob’s vision for the center and attract promising students to study at Indiana.
It is so great to catch up with and appreciate the success of Rob’s students. In addition to Noriko, another of Rob’s students, Eric T. Meyer, came to Oxford in a research position while I was director of the OII, and is now Dean and the Chancellor’s Professor of Social Informatics at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Rob would be so proud of his students and their accomplishments – but not surprised, I’m sure.
Noriko’s research continues to focus on social informatics. Most recently she has focused on knowledge sharing in the sciences, such as on public engagement with science and communities of practice in mediated environments, and often grappling with science communication on contentious topics, including studies in such contexts as COVID-19, vaccinations, climate change, and Artificial Intelligence.
Rob and I worked with Jim Danziger and Ken Kraemer on one of my first books on the political implications of computing, entitled Computers and Politics (OUP 1982). The four of us along with John L. King, Ken’s student, and later to become a professor and Dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Information, count among the most memorable collaborations I have ever experienced. Many thanks to Noriko for keeping those memories alive.
