Computational visualistics, media informatics, and virtual communities / Jochen Schneider, Thomas Strothotte, Winfried Martzki, (eds.)

In recent years there has been a rising awareness within the international scientific commu- nity that there is a need to study the various aspects of the integration of images and new me- dia both from the point of view of computer science as well as from other areas which deal with users' interface to information sources, in particular design, psychology, education, po- litical science, sociology, and philosophy. To a certain extent the view of the topic from any single one of these disciplines leads to a one-sided analysis. Indeed, interdisciplinary approaches involving two or more of them ap- plied to selected research problems have emerged. Examples of scientific conferences which embody such approaches are CHI and the German "e;Mensch und Computer"e; Conferences, where in particular the collaboration between disciplines is furthered. Truly interdisciplinary research involving pairs of disciplines, or even triplets or quadruples of these areas, are still few and far between.