Modeling the human factors of scholarly communities supported through the Internet and World Wide Web

The Internet (the net) and World Wide Web (the web) have grown rapidly in the past decade and have come to play a major role in supporting discourse and publication in scholarly communities. The development and application of new services has been very rapid with little central planning, and despite the widespread use, there is little information as yet on the human factors of the use of the net and web. In particular, models of the human factors of individuals interacting with workstations have to be extended to take into account the essential social aspects of computer-mediated discourse and publication. This article provides a framework for analyzing the utility, usability, and likeability of net and web services, and illustrates its application to significant aspects of supporting scholarly communities. The utility of the net and web are measured in terms of the growth of usage, and the different services involved are distinguished in terms of their specific utilities. A layered protocol model is used to model discourse through the net, and is extended to encompass interaction in communities. An operational criterion for distinguishing different communities is defined in terms of the types of awareness that resource providers and users have of one another. A temporal model of discourse processes is developed that enables the spectrum of services ranging from real-time discourse to long-term publication to be analyzed in a unified framework. The dimensions of awareness and time are used to characterize and compare the full range of net services, and model their unification through the next generation of web browsers. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.