Mapping Human–Computer Interaction Research Themes and Trends from Its Existence to Today: A Topic Modeling-Based Review of past 60 Years

ABSTRACT

As it covers a wide spectrum, the research literature of human-computer interaction (HCI) studies has a rich and multi-disciplinary content where there are limited studies demonstrating the big picture of the field. Such an analysis provides researchers with a better understanding of the field, revealing current issues, challenges, and potential research gaps. This study aims to explore the research trends in the developmental stages of the HCI studies over the past 60 years. Automated text mining with probabilistic topic modeling has been used to analyze 41,720 journal articles that are indexed by the SCOPUS database between 1957 and 2018. The results of this study reveal 21 major topics mapping the research landscape of HCI. By extending the discovered topics beyond a snapshot, the topics were analyzed considering their developmental stages, volume, and accelerations to provide a panoramic view that shows the increase and decrease of trends over time. In this context, the transition of HCI studies from machine-oriented systems to human-oriented systems indicates its future direction toward context-aware adaptive systems.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fatih Gurcan

Fatih Gurcan is an Instructor in the Center for Research and Application in Distance Education of Karadeniz Technical University (KTU), Trabzon, Turkey. His research interests include trend analysis, sentiment analysis, statistical topic modeling, data mining, machine learning, human-computer interaction, big data analytics, and text mining.

Nergiz Ercil Cagiltay

Nergiz Ercil Cagiltay received the degree in computer engineering and the Ph.D. degree in instructional technology from Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey. Her research interests include information systems, surgical education, instructional technology, e-learning and human-computer interaction. She is an Associate Prof. at the Software Engineering Department of Atilim University.

Kursat Cagiltay

Kursat Cagiltay earned an MS in computer engineering and Ph.D. in Instructional Technology from the Indiana University, USA and currently Prof. of the Instructional Technology Department, METU. He is the director of Audio-Visual Research Center. His research interests are human–computer interaction, technology enhanced learning, distance education and electronic games/simulations.