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Vol.26 No.4, October 1994
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Vol.26 No.4, October 1994 |
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As I look round the SIGCHI Bulletin editorial office, pools of light picking out the piles of publishers' bumf, the sheets of old camera not-quite-ready copy, the coffee-ringed back issues of the Bulletin, the little piles of floppy disks sent by contributors, each in a slightly-more-arcane format than the previous, the curled and yellowing can-you-make-this-just-one-last-I-promise-change-to-my-article faxes from people who apparently appreciate that someone who gets orders of magnitudes more emails than faxes reads the faxes first, I reflect that it is now a year since I was sitting in a cabin in a Swedish forest, halfway on a journey overland to the EWHCI conference in Moscow, Russia, telephone to one ear, finger in the other, straining to listen to a message on my answering machine in the Netherlands from someone in California congratulating me on my appointment as Editor-in-chief of the SIGCHI Bulletin, and asking if I could make it the next day to a meeting in Los Angeles.
By chance, I recently read this:
It is easy enough to find a competent editor; pick someone at random off the street, and provided they have the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, the political skill of Machiavelli, and encyclopaedic knowledge of all aspects of the field, and the kind of eye that can spot instantly that one of the items in the bibliography of a fifty-page paper fails to get referred to in the text, [...] they'll be able to run a half-way decent journal. (1)
Of course, when I was listening to that phone message, I had no real idea of what I was letting myself in for, and certainly not that you had to have so many prerequisites for the job. All I can say now is "I did it", and breathe a sigh of relief, and pronounce myself no more "the new editor" or "the still relatively new editor" of the SIGCHI Bulletin but just "the editor".
But still, I didn't do it alone. Producing the SIGCHI Bulletin is a lot of work, and it would have been an impossible amount without all those other people whose names appear on the inside front cover of each Bulletin.
Since the inside front cover isn't the first place anyone thinks of going to for interesting reading matter, I'd just like to draw attention to all those names, and thank them all for the hard work they have done this year to make the Bulletin what it is: the column writers and editors, the department and assistant editors, the editorial assistants, all of whom put in many hours of hard work each issue.
Finally, recognition should go to my employers, the Dutch National Research Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, CWI, for the great environment that they have set up, the workstations, networks, printers, and phototypesetter, that helps so much in the production of the Bulletin, and to the system administrators who have to put up with my panicked calls for help when the file server goes down or the Garamond font suddenly disappears from the printer hours before a deadline.
The October Bulletin is traditionally the look-back-at-CHI issue, and guess what, this one is no exception. There are an amazing number of sessions that run at CHI, making it very hard to decide which to go to (or, in the case of some people I know, which ones they would have gone to if they hadn't had all of those meetings to go to). But thanks to all the people who are willing to write reports for the Bulletin, those of us unable to go to the conference at all, and those of us unable to be in several places simultaneously, can at least keep track of what happens at all those sessions.
If I buy a newspaper in the Netherlands, it has pages of home news, all about the Netherlands, and then pages of international news, seldom with any reference to the Netherlands. If I buy a paper in Paris, there are exactly the same features with regards to France. Now if someone from Japan (let us say) buys some publication, and reads under the heading International an article about Japan, that reader may not feel that the publication is addressing him or her, but some other audience. For a Japanese reader, Japan is not an international issue. As a consequence Claire-Marie Karat (one of the two International Editors) and I brainstormed for a new title for the "International" column that would hopefully not have that connotation, and opted for "World-Wide CHI".
And now on to the next volume, onwards, forwards, upwards!
Steven Pemberton.
Email: Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl
World wide web: http://www.cwi.nl/~steven
Correction: the email address quoted for the authors of the Interaction Design Special Feature in the July issue should have been: drijken@artmediatech.nl.
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Vol.26 No.4, October 1994 |
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