Shulman Named Editor of IT & Politics Journal

 
   
 

S.ShulmanStuart Shulman has been named Editor in Chief of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, a forum for policymakers, practitioners, and technology industry leaders in addition to academics and researchers. The primary objectives of the journal are to promote a better understanding of how evolving information technologies interact with political and governmental processes and outcomes at many levels, to encourage the development of governmental and political processes that employ IT in novel and interesting ways, and to foster the development of new information technology tools and theories that can capture, analyze, and report on these developments. Regular features of JITP will include research papers, policy viewpoints, articles on teaching innovation, as well as a special category of submission called “Workbench Notes,” which present a brief introduction and evaluation of one or more novel ITP tools developed to gain analytical leverage over political processes, or to advance political science instruction. The journal’s inaugural issue will appear in fall 2007.

Shulman, who holds a joint appointment in Pitt’s School of Information Sciences and the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, has garnered an international reputation as an expert on e-Government.  In fact, he and his collaborators are recipients of more than $2.2 million in funding support from the National Science Foundation for his work on digital citizenship and e-rulemaking.

JITP will be an outlet for interdisciplinary manuscripts focusing on how IT is changing politics, a domain “not typically well represented by scholarly articles in leading political science journals,” said Shulman, who also is Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program in Pitt’s University Center for Social and Urban Research. “We’d like to establish a top-tier interdisciplinary journal, one that brings social scientists together with information and computer scientists in emergent research areas,” he said.

For example, JITP might feature a special issue on political blogs, with an emphasis on the possibility of new, large scale, IT-enhanced data collection, analysis, and visualization. “It’s unlikely you’d see that in any but a few of the other social science journals,” said Shulman.

Shulman is a Senior Research Associate in the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) and in the Université de Genève-, European University Institute-, and Oxford Internet Institute-based E-Democracy Centre. He was the organizer and chair for federal agency-level electronic rulemaking workshops funded by the NSF and held at the Council for Excellence in Government (2001), the National Defense University (2002), the National Science Foundation (2003), and The George Washington University (2004).  He regularly offers graduate-level courses on Digital Citizenship and Digital Governance. 

 

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