Expanding Scientific Community Reach Based on Web Access Data

Knowing the main characteristics of a scientific community, how it reaches all stakeholders, and understanding how individuals engage around a subject is needed in order to support decision makers to plan strategies to maintain and nurture the community. This work presents a new way of interpreting the reach of a scientific community by incorporating Web access data to the co-author network commonly considered. The case presented involves the Brazilian Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community and the access to the website of the XV Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computer Systems, the main HCI conference in Brazil. The proposed method is grounded on Organizational Semiotics and differs from the existing works because it considers a wider population than the conference authors. Inspired by the Organizational Onion, it considers three different levels of connection: Informal, Formal, and Technical. In the presented case, the reach commonly used (i.e., author-author network) counts on 257 authors while the total of people orbiting the event involved 5,432 unique visitors, in other words, the co-author network represents approximately 5% of the population orbiting the event. The presented method shows that data originated from Web accesses support a different way of representing a scientific community reach, including multiple segments that are commonly not considered as the target-audience, resulting in a more inclusive approach in the sense of considering the plurality of people orbiting an event, mediated or not by a computer. Our contribution shows a data informed approach of expanding the scientific community reach in order to characterize people orbiting the conference.