Newbie professor and Broughton resident Hazel Hall officially takes up her chair at Edinburgh Napier University with her inaugural lecture ‘What’s so Social about Informatics?’ on 15 March, writes Ella Taylor-Smith.
People who meet Hazel through her social informatics work are surprised she is a small ginger lady; people who meet her at parties are surprised she is a professor. Many are wondering what social informatics is.
Apparently, it’s the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts. (Trying to make our experiences of computers and phones less painful and more useful by exploring real users and real life.)
People from all over the world are will be attending the lecture, and you can go along too: follow this link for further details, and register your interest by emailing events@napier.ac.uk. Or simply say hello if you see her in the street. Hazel is friendly on and offline.