Ingar Roggen

Ingar Roggen (Dich Ingar Emil Roggen, born 26 April 1934 in Valencia, Spain) is considered one of the European social informatics pioneers. His field of work is focused on the social aspects of virtual space, the social analysis of Internet, the interaction between man and computer, and with the implications of the information technology usage communication in all fields of society. In 1996 he introduced the Sociology of the World Wide Web (web sociology) as a web science, based on the principles of social informatics. He earned the Norwegian degree of Magister Artium (Mag.Art., English: Ph.D.) in sociology in 1970 with a thesis on social time, where he developed a theory of Relative Social Time with tense logic as method. Through a series of studies of health risk factors in Norwegian industries and social services in 1970-1990 he developed a system for detection, prediction and prevention of supermortality in workplaces. At the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo in Norway he held a position as a lecturer until retirement in 2004.

From a global historical viewpoint Stein Braten must be considered as the founder of the science of social informatics, which he originally called "socioinformatics" (Norwegian: sosioinformatikk). He defined it as the common field of psychology, sociology and informatics. (Stein Braten: Dialogens vilkar i datasamfunnet. Universitetsforlaget 1983.) At the Department of Sociology, University of Oslo (UiO) Stein Braten inspired a group of pioneers in this field, including Eivind Jahren, Arild Jansen and Ingar Roggen. When web sociology was introduced in 1996, the first World Wide Web Virtual Laboratoratory (known as Weblab at UiO) was established at the Department of Sociology, directed by Ingar Roggen in collaboration with Knut A. G. Hauge and Trond Enger. The Department offered degrees up to the master (Norwegian: Cand.Polit.) level in these fields until 2000. While Kristen Nygaard's Simula was the programming language shared by the early socioinformaticians, the web sociologists gathered around Bill Atkinson's HyperCard with the programming language HyperTalk, the forerunner of the WWW-languages. The late Rob Kling, who had been given a personal introduction by Stein Braten to the ongoing research on social informatics at the University of Oslo in 1986, and also had noted the introduction of web sociology in January 1996, established the American branch of social informatics at Indiana University later that year.