The 2009 Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) Annual Conference and Joint Meetings has already successfully held on 6 to 8 October at Academia Sinica in Taipei. TELearn 2009 and GIS in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2009 were held jointly. The main theme for this year’s conference is “Social Computing”.

According to the Wikipedia, social computing refers to an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems.  It has to do with supporting any sort of social behavior in or through computational systems.  It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology.  It also has to do with supporting “computations” that are carried out by groups of people.  Examples include blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking as well as collaborative filtering, online auctions, prediction markets, and reputation systems.  It is obvious that all these are having a profound impact on our daily life.  The main theme for this conference calls for input from perspectives of social sciences as well as information technology to address this emerging issue. During 3 days discussion, scholars have exchanged their progress in the filed of digital archives, e-learning, social computing, GIS, and e Culture research. Most scholars agree that the academics have to pay more attention to the development of social network, which will obviously play a crutial role in the future.

Since its initiation in 1993, the annual PNC Conference has become a key portal for access to digital application research on the Pacific Rim.  It is also a forum for interactions among scholars, engineers, librarians, museum professionals, educators, and site managers working with cultural materials and technology.  PNC’s increasingly important role in the Pacific Rim scholarly community is expected with the advent of the era of social computing.  Please join us at Academia Sinica in October to learn the latest development in this fascinating field.

Furthering reading

Pacific Neighborhood Consortium Annual Conference 2009

http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2009/english/index.html