Toward a Core Bibliography of Presence

ACORE LITERATURE Is a set of published written works that are considered “essential,” “significant,” “of lasting importance,” or “of permanent value” to an area of study. It is assumed that although each scholar has specific and often unique interests within a topic area and therefore considers many written works concerning those interests to be “fundamental,” most members of an area of scholarly study will share a foundational knowledge, and that this knowledge will be represented in certain more commonly respected written works in the area. These works constitute a core literature. Researchers have attempted to construct lists and compilations of core literatures in fields and subfields including psychology,1 sports psychology,2 psychology of perception,3 psychiatry,4 organization development,5 famology (the study of families),6 family dynamics of addiction,7 American literature,8,9 law,10,11 econometrics,12 and agricultural sciences.13 Many of these efforts have been motivated by a desire to provide a resource for students, teachers, and others. For students, such compilations represent an introduction to the historical development and current focus of their field. Works in a core literature can also help illustrate to students the characteristics of valuable work in their field and insight into the characteristics of valued scholarship in the area. Awareness that they have read or reviewed works in a core literature might also reassure them that they are prepared to enter the field as scholars and teachers. Teachers can utilize core literatures as they develop curricula and reading lists (e.g., a personal review of core literature in law by Day11 was prompted by the desire to develop a course on legal “classics”). Gorenflo1 suggests that core literature reference lists can also help editors of introductory textbooks ensure representativeness, and researchers, publishers, and librarians are likely to benefit in a variety of ways from the identification of core literatures. While pedagogy has motivated many studies of core literatures, others have been designed to identify the direction in which a field is moving,11 review key work during a particularly important era,13 identify areas within disciplines,5 and assess the disciplinary status of topic areas.6 The following bibliography constitutes a draft version of a core literature in the field of presence research and we hope it will serve many of the goals described above. The bibliography is divided into two main categories, books and papers. While this bibliography is selective, given the massive amount of literature available on presence and its related technologies (virtual reality, cinema, telerobotics, etc.), more comprehensive bibliographies are also available and for these we direct the reader to two online resources that have the specific goal of providing information to people working in the area of presence research: