IRIS (1978-2006) Historical Reflection through Visual Analysis

IRIS (Information Systems Research in Scandinavia) Conference is an annual meeting for researchers in Scandinavia. Through 29 annual conference meetings a social network of co-authorships and general research collaboration has emerged. This article contributes a historical reflection and analysis of the social network of researchers associated with the IRIS in the period from 1978 to 2006. We make use of the network visualization and analysis tool called Commetrix. We will examine the influence of certain researchers in this network by identifying their betweenness centrality and degree centrality. We will reflect on the nature and characteristic of the research topics by analyzing the network of keywords found in the conference paper titles, and visualizing their representation in the network. Molka-Danielsen et al.: IRIS (1978-2006) Historical Reflection through Visual Analysis Proceedings of the 30th Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia IRIS 2007 2 Introduction Information Systems Research in Scandinavia or IRIS is an annual meeting of researchers of information systems that began in 1978, where the first meeting took place in Tampere, Finland. Indeed the first 4 meetings were in Finland, championed by founders Pertti Järvinen and Pentti Kerola, and a majority of Finnish contributors. After that time the meetings have rotated among the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. One participant that came in the early years and has attended nearly all the meetings is Markku I. Nurminen. He describes through his experience the birth of the conference and the founding elements of the research community, “The scientific community in Information Systems Research was, indeed, existing in the Scandinavian countries already before that date (of the first IRIS).”(Nurminen, 1997, p.48) But, how do we evaluate the significance of IRIS? It was founded as a forum where the ideas of Scandinavian researchers could be debated, expressed, and explored. This also prepared works for a greater impact on the international scientific community. Nurminen expresses this motive in the early meetings: “The discussion in all four meetings was focused on systemeering and systemeering method(ologie)s, which also was the explicit intention. The specific theme of IRIS 2 was ISAC1 and of IRIS 4 the PSC2 model. Another passion was the definition of the basic concepts and their underlying assumptions.”(Nurminen, 1997, p.51) In 2006, some of these terms will no longer be found in present day article titles. Terms like “infologically oriented systemeering” have transferred meaning to terms like “Information Systems Development” in more recent literature. (Lundeberg, et al., 1981), (Goldkuhl, 2006) While citations are often used to determine impact of research in research communities, we think this is only one measure. Social networks of themselves have great social value and lead to future collaborations. This paper will examine a social network of co-authors that presented works in association with the annual IRIS conference. We will use social network analysis (SNA) to examine the centrality of some of the IRIS community members in contributing to the growth of this community of researchers. In addition, we will reflect on the evolution of topics in this network over time using a novel technical method to visually animate the actual dynamics of the co-authorship network over time. This paper is organized as follows: relevant research is presented in the Literature Review. The section Research Methodology informs of our source of data and approach. Visual Results through Commetrix are next presented. This 1 “In 1973 ISAC was an acronym for Information Systems for Administrative Control. Later it was changed to Information Systems work and Analysis of Changes.” (Goldkuhl, 2006, p.1) 2 PSC is a systemeering model with three phases: semantic (S), pragmatic (P) and constructive (C). It was much discussed at the early IRIS meetings. (Kerola, 1979) (Kerola and Järvinen, 1979) (Kerola and Taggart, 1980) (Taggart, 1980) Molka-Danielsen et al.: IRIS (1978-2006) Historical Reflection through Visual Analysis Proceedings of the 30th Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia IRIS 2007 3 section is followed importantly by Interpretation of Results in a Historical Context and summarized in Concluding Remarks.