James Howison

James Howison

Interim Associate Dean for Research & Associate Professor


Biography

James Howison studies open collaboration, particularly in software development, including open source software development and the development of software in science. His work has been supported by grants from the NSF, including a 2015 NSF CAREER award and a 2019 PECASE award, as well as the Sloan Foundation. James has published in the fields of Information Systems, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Information Sciences (e.g., MIS Quarterly, ACM CSCW Conference, and JASIST), as well as keynotes for industry and funding agency advisory events. Recently James has contributed to the development of [CiteAs](http://citeas.org), a system to improve incentives for high quality software work in science by mapping from software to its requested citation and released [a gold standard dataset of software mentions in publications](http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4444074), to facilitate improved rewards for software work in science. James joined the school of information in 2011. CV and Publications at james.howison.name.

Degrees

PhD in Information Science and Technology from Syracuse (2008), Bachelor's of Economics (Social Sciences) at the University of Sydney (1998)

Areas Of Specialization

Distributed Work
Technology & Human Collaboration
Software Development By Scientists
Social Network Analysis
Free and Open Source Software Development

Recent Publications

Aron Lindberg, James Howison, Nicholas Berente, Kalle Lyytinen (2024)Discursive Modulation in Open Source Software: How Communities Shape Novelty andComplexity, MIS Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2023/16872

Hana Frluckaj, James Howison, Laura Dabbish & Nikki Stevens (2024) Understanding Trans Experiences in Open Source Software Projects ACM CSCW.

Moon, E., & Howison, J. (2024). A dynamic perspective on software modularity in opensource software (OSS) development: A configurational approach. Information andOrganization, 34(1), 100499. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2023.100499

Lopez, P., Du, Caifan, Cohoon, J., & Howison, James. (2021). Mining Software Entities in Scientific Literature: Document-level NER for an Extremely Imbalanced and Large-scale Task. ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2021). https://doi.org/10.1145/3459637.3481936

Du, C., Cohoon, J., Lopez, P., & Howison, J. (2022). Understanding progress in softwarecitation: A study of software citation in the CORD-19 corpus. PeerJ Computer Science, 8,e1022. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1022

Du, C., Cohoon, J., Lopez, P., & Howison, J. (2021). Softcite dataset: A dataset of softwarementions in biomedical and economic research publications. Journal of the Association forInformation Science and Technology. 72 (7), 870-884. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24454

Cohoon, J and Howison, J. (2021) The Role of Values and Cyberinfrastructure in OpenScience. Information and Culture. 56 (2), 115-137. https://doi.org/10.7560/IC56201

View more in Google Scholar

Recent Awards

  • Invited to give Distinguished Lecture at NSF CISE/SBE
  • PECASE award (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers) through nomination from the NSF.
  • Best Information Systems Publications Award. , Association for Information Systems.
  • CAREER Award (CISE division), NSF

Recent Courses

YearSemesterCourse NumberCourseSyllabusNotes
2025Spring TermI 320STopics in Social Informatics: Open Source Software Development
2025Spring TermI 320DTopics in Human-Centered Data Science: Open Source Software Development
2024Fall TermINF 385T.09Special Topics in Information Science: Data Wrangling
2024Spring TermI 320DTopics in Human-Centered Data Science: Open Source Software Development Open Source Software Development
2023Fall TermINF 385T.09Special Topics in Information Science: Data Wrangling
2023Spring TermINF 391D.11The Research Enterprise
2023Spring TermI 320DTopics in Human-Centered Data Science: Open Source Software Development Open Source Software Development
2022Fall TermI 320DTopics in Human-Centered Data Science: Data Engineering Data Engineering
2022Spring TermINF 391D.11The Research Enterprise
2022Spring TermINF 385T.09Special Topics in Information Science: Data Wrangling
2021Spring TermINF 391D.11The Research Enterprise
2021Spring TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Peer Production
2020Fall TermINF 385T.09Special Topics in Information Science: Data Wrangling
2020Spring TermINF 385T.09Special Topics in Information Science: Data Wrangling
2020Spring TermINF 388LProfessional Experience and Project
2020Spring TermINF 388RPracticum in School Libraries
2019Fall TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Peer Production
2019Spring TermINF 385T.09Special Topics in Information Science: Data Wrangling
2018Fall TermINF 391D.11The Research Enterprise
2018Fall TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Technology Learning Studio
2018Fall TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Data Wrangling
2018Spring TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Peer Production
2017Fall TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Technology Learning Studio
2017Fall TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Data Wrangling
2017Spring TermINF 385TSpecial Topics in Information Science Data Wrangling