CFP: MEDIACITY 5 International Conference and Exhibition

CALL FOR PAPERS

MEDIACITY 5 International Conference and Exhibition
1st ­ 3rd May 2015
Plymouth University, UK
http://mediacity.i-dat.org

The theme of the fifth MEDIACITY conference is reflecting on social smart
cities.

Much of our thinking around technology and the city is based around polarising paradigms. On one hand we have the smart city agenda that is underpinned by a vision of data-centred optimisation of urban systems and on the other hand we have a open-source, citizen driven approach based around ad-hoc practices and prototyping of counter-culture scenarios.

These paradigms of city visions are described variously through terms such as “digital city, screen city, media city, sentient city, u-city, fusion city, hybrid city, intelligent city, connectiCity, pervasive city and the smart city” and we seek to look beyond the rhetoric and critically reflect and imagine new models and approaches to media and the city. We want to challenge over-simplified assumptions around terms such as smart city, and understand in more detail the complex interactions between social actors and technological transformations of the city. The aim of the conference is to consider more fully the multiple, subtle, and interdependent spatio-temporalities which together work to constitute ICT-based urban change. In particular we will discuss models of participation, action and agency, shifting capacity to act beyond the ‘like’ button and to take responsibility for the future shape of the city.

The conference addresses the approaches and the corresponding design responses that meet the challenges of social, citizen-centred, smart cities and communities. It will offer reflective, high quality theoretical and design-based responses to the question of how media and ICTs can create alternative responses to current societal challenges.

Topics
We will look at urbanity and digital media and ideas of place and space and reflect on new models, landscapes and frameworks in the social smart city. We explore how ‘the city’ as a site of participation is enabled through media and technology and modes of citizen participation and agency as well as how temporal installations and urban prototyping enable us to imagine other possible futures. We will also look to the Internet of Things to explore the way in which objects increasingly become sentient actors in urban life. Through this we will address broader issues of resilience and sustainability and how these intertwine with media and technological frameworks. We provisionally propose three main sub-themes:

Place
Urban Design, public place-making, network infrastructures and resilience

People
social participation, urban prototyping, big data and agency

Things
The Internet of Things (IoT), sentience, social memory and networked objects.

The conference audience will be drawn from an interdisciplinary field of architecture, geography, human computer interaction, planning, media studies, art and sociology to gather and exchange multiple perspectives on common challenges.

CONTRIBUTIONS
Submissions to be uploaded to the conference’s EasyChair website:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mc5

Paper abstracts
Paper submissions are a two-stage process. Authors are asked to submit an abstract for consideration. Authors of accepted abstracts will then be asked to submit a camera-ready paper prior to the conference. These will appear in the Conference proceedings. Abstracts must be a minimum of one page (500 words) and no longer than two pages (1000 words), including all additional material such as references, appendices, and figures. The abstracts must include a title, sufficient space for the author name(s) to appear on the paper, abstract and references. The review will be double-blind, so please submit abstracts in an anonymised version.

Conference full papers will be approx. 5000-6000 words in length and will be peer reviewed.

Posters
Poster submissions should include an abstract of no longer than one page (500 words). The abstract should state the contribution and originality of the work and make clear how the work differs from significant prior research. Posters will be shown for the duration of the main conference.

Workshops
Workshops can either be based on sharing knowledge or experience around a particular focused sub-topic or can be a skill-sharing event focused around a particular technology or methodology. Workshops will be half-day events. Proposals should be no longer than two pages and should include: the title, the list of organisers and their backgrounds, and an abstract of no more than 150 words; as well as the workshop’s theme, goals and activities; maximum number of participants, means of soliciting participation, and means of selecting participants.

Exhibition - Urban Interventions
Proposals are invited for artistic and experimental projects that explore the host city as a site of experimentation and participation. These can be a site-specific project, an event or an installation, but should focus on artistic and creative approaches to the social smart city approach and how this can have value and impact for the local citizens and organisations.

These interventions can feed off, play with or supplement the data harvested from the city infrastructure through an ‘Urban API’ being developed by i-DAT as a component of its Operating Systems. A small budget will be available for selected projects. Proposals from artists should be no longer than two pages and should include: a title, a short summary, bios/CV’s of the artist(s), a 150 word description of the project, a timeline, and an outline of how the project will engage with the local
city and the types of citizen participation.

All papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Selected authors will be invited to contribute papers to an edited book to be completed post conference.

CONTACT
If you have any questions or require further information please contact:
mediacity@plymouth.ac.uk
web: http://mediacity.i-dat.org

Twitter: @mediacity5

IMPORTANT DATES
1st December 2014 11:59pm GMT           

Workshop Expressions of Interest deadline

25th January 2015 11.59 GMT (was 4th Jan)

Paper submission deadline,
Exhibition submission deadline

15th February 2015 11.59 GMT

Notification of acceptance issued to authors

1st April 2015                           

Camera ready papers due

1st -3rd May 2015                   

Conference, workshops and exhibition in Plymouth, UK

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
Katharine S. Willis, School of Architecture, Design and Environment, Plymouth University
Mike Phillips, Institute of Digital Art and Technology (i-DAT), Plymouth University
Alessandro Aurigi, School of Architecture, Design and Environment, Plymouth University
Gianni Corino, Institute of Digital Art and Technology (i-DAT), Plymouth University

Jointly organised by: School of Architecture, Design and Environment and Institute of Digital Art and Technology Plymouth University, UK
http://www1.plymouth.ac.uk/schools/ade/
http://i-dat.org/information/

CFP: Time Travelers: Temporality and Digital Mapping

CFP: Time Travelers: Temporality and Digital Mapping

Digital mapping, though generally conceived as a spatial activity, is as strongly grounded in time. With the digital era disintegrating representational fixity, scholars, adept at grappling with the spatial implications of digitality, continue to struggle to conceptualize and communicate the temporal consequences of maps that shift with each moment.

In this peer-reviewed collection we seek to take up Doreen Massey’s (2005: 107) still critical concern: how do we cope with the ‘ongoing stories’ in the world. Mapping has long wrestled with the difficulty of enrolling time into such narratives. This collection aims to examine how this is impacted by the presence of digital mapping technologies that, arguably, have disrupted our understanding of time as much as they have provided coherence.

We are looking for contributions that move beyond the descriptive to pay particular attention to what might be called the ‘critical dynamics’ of time. Examples of such approaches may include drawing on phenomenology and the body (Massumi, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl), theorizing play and ludic devices (Huizinga, Caillois), employing network/assemblage thinking (Latour, De Landa), reading such concerns through philosophers of technology (Stiegler, Simondon etc.). In each case contributions should focus on, or cross-cut between , digital maps, digital mapping or digital locative-media.

We encourage contributions on a range of themes:

• Rhythm (mapping and/or analysis of rhythm(s)
• Inscription, folding or layering of temporality
• ‘Real-time’ data visualization
• Playing with mapping time
• Urban ‘ghostings’ or hauntings
• Surveillant temporalities
• The temporality of designing maps.
• Present absences / absent presences
• Methodologies of temporal recovery / analysis
• Changing everyday digital mapping cultures
• Political valence of temporal dynamics
• ‘Capturing’ and the flows of everyday life
• Affective technologies and the half-second delay
• (Digital) mapping moments or events
• Fast/slow cartographies
• Temporal dashboards
• Play time
• Attention, interest and changing modes of temporal production
• Temporality of creative processes
• Designing time
• Temporal complexities
• Temporality at the interface: haptic and participatory presence
• Interfaces and digital ‘feeds’ / content immediacy
• The blackboxing of temporality
• Futures and/or loss of futurity
• Spatial stories and narrative cartographies
• Embodied mapping practice

We invite contributions from range of methodological, theoretical and practical vantage points, and are particularly interested in bringing together a variety of approaches, from junior and senior researchers, and from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

Please send a full chapter of between 4000 and 8000 words (Chicago manual of style), with a short biography of 100 words by 18 December 2014 to: chartingthedigital@gmail.com. We use Easychair as our submission system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=chatemp2014

For other inquiries please contact: chartingthedigital@gmail.com.

CFP: CCA 2015 Annual meeting- Technology and Emerging Media

* CCA 2015 Annual meeting: Call for papers - Technology and Emerging Media *

We invite you to submit a proposal (individual paper, panel or roundtable) to the Technology and Emerging Media (TEM) track within the next Canadian Communication Association conference that will take place on June 3-5, 2015 at the University of Ottawa.

All participants in the TEM track will have the opportunity to submit a paper based on their presentation, for inclusion in the "TEM Proceedings" that are published online on the interest group¹s website: http://tem.fl.ulaval.ca/ Detailed guidelines will be e-mailed to TEM participants in due course.

The "Technology and Emerging Media" track covers works addressing a wide range of communication and media-related issues, with a focus on technology and technological innovation. Particularly relevant to the track are proposals addressing the following topics:

• Information and communication technologies, notably aspects of their design, diffusion, and uses;
• Digital media and related social phenomena;
• Issues related to recent technological developments in the field of communication: social media/social Web, mobile media, online games, and new diffusion platforms for traditional media.

Please note that in order for your proposal to be included in the TEM track, we ask that you select "technology and emerging media" as a topic on the submission form. Further details on the submission process can be found at: http://www.acc-cca.ca/submit

The Technology and Emerging Media section is now an official CCA interest group. If you are interested in joining the group, please send a note to: guillaume.latzko-toth@com.ulaval.ca to be registered to the TEM mailing list.

IMPORTANT: EXTENDED deadline for submitting proposals to the CCA conference is: December 22, 2014. General call for papers: http://www.acc-cca.ca/callforpaper

CFP: Protest Participation in Variable Communication Ecologies: Meanings, Modalities and Implications

CFP: Protest Participation in Variable Communication Ecologies: Meanings, Modalities and Implications
24-26 June 2014

Sardinia, Italy

http://protestcommunicationecologies.com/

Contemporary collective action, social movements, civic and political protests are characterized by a growing complexity of actors, contents, repertories, contexts, and effects. Grappling with the implications of late modernity, scholars worldwide have reflected on the cross-fertilization of individual practices and collective mobilizations. They have foregrounded unconventional forms of engagement, through reflexive, expressive and embodied acts of dissent cutting across the cultural, political, and social domains, in persistent as well as increasingly transient modes of organisation and belonging. Within this field,  some accounts graft social  media as an independent variable that would mitigate the democratic deficits of mass-mediated and institutionalised politics. Others would warn of the power imbalances and the inequalities in participation particularly social media reinforce or heighten.

Keynote speakers
Lance Bennett (University of Washington, USA)
Natalie Fenton (Goldsmith College, University of London, UK)
Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)
Bev Skeggs (Goldsmith College, University of London, UK)


Seeking to kindle an imagination that situates social media in lived experience and practice, this conference intends to unpick the history and the present of linkages but also of any signs of a conscious uncoupling of network technologies, broadcasting media and physical places where protest participation is enacted. In doing so, we aim to tackle the significant challenges posed to democratic politics, social theory and research by resultant variable communication ecologies.

The organizers invite theoretical reflections and empirical analyses tracking continuities and changes in protest participation arising in the blurred lines between social media, broadcasting media and physical places. In particular, the conference welcomes contributions that address the following questions:

• What forms of civic/uncivic protest participation are (de)activated in contemporary communication ecologies?
• What are the effects of these different forms of participation on institutional politics, political culture, civic education, collective identities and the media?
• Which structural - both societal and technological - elements of contemporary communication ecologies enable, accentuate or discourage protest participation?
• Which type of content converges and is hybridized in the practices of protest participants, of protest-covering media or of the organizations that are targets of protest?
• Which forms of exclusion are being overcome or heightened in the communication ecologies where protest participation is instantiated?
• What are the conceptual challenges ahead of us? As we query communication ecologies, do concepts old and new, e.g. "mediatization", "convergence", "remediation", "boundary publics", "connective action" continue to be analytically informing for mapping the nature and meaning of participation in protest as well as in the civic life beyond it?
• Which methodological obstacles arise for research oriented towards analysing protest participation in variable communication ecologies? And how do we overcome them?

We invite 500 word abstracts that outline the envisaged potential to tackle such questions in innovative ways. Abstracts should be accompanied by a 100-word biography of the presenter(s) together with contact details. Abstracts/biographies/contact details should be sent to protest_ecologies@uniss.it<mailto:protest_ecologies@uniss.it>.

Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis by the scientific committee. The final deadline for submission is 30th January 2015. Without compromising scientific standards, the Conference aims for a wide geographical representation of scientists. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out at the earliest opportunity and no later than March 2015.

Following the conference, participants will be invited to submit their papers for consideration by the journal iCS - Information, Communication & Society which will dedicate a special issue to the conference proceedings. At that time, contributions will also be invited to an edited collection.

CFP: Embarrassing Interactions: A CHI 2015 Workshop

Call: Embarrassing Interactions: A CHI 2015 Workshop

http://embarrassinginteractions.org

CHI 2015
April 18-23 in Seoul, Korea
http://chi2015.acm.org/

No matter whether mobile devices, ubiquitous computing, intercultural human-computer interaction (HCI), public interfaces, interactive art, experimental games, social computing, or robots and virtual agents: wherever new technologies disturb or merge situational norms and audiences, embarrassment is likely. Thus, (fear of) embarrassment presents a fundamental hurdle to adoption and engagement for any interactive system, but also a design space for experimental interfaces.

This one-day workshop, co-located with CHI 2015 in Seoul, convenes researchers, designers, and artists to share and advance the current state of knowledge on embarrassment in HCI, and chart an agenda for future work. We especially invite participants across cultures to enable cross-cultural debate, and work that can be engaged with on site.

TOPICS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:

• Forms, causes, conditions, processes of embarrassment in HCI
• Cultural differences in embarrassment; embarrassment in intercultural HCI and interactive systems crossing cultures
• Design for reducing embarrassment as an undesired experience and hurdle to adoption and engagement
• Design for embarrassment as a desired experience in art, education, activism

SUBMISSION:

Interested authors should submit a 3-4 page position paper in the CHI extended abstract format together with a 50-word biography to http://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=embarassing15. Practitioners can alternatively submit a presentation. We also invite researchers, artists, and designers to submit works that relate to embarrassment and can be engaged with during the workshop. The organizing committee will review submissions and select up to 20 based on relevance, quality, and diversity of inputs. Papers, presentations, work descriptions, and biographies will be published on the workshop site. See embarrassinginteractions.org for details.

IMPORTANT DATES:

January 2, 2015: Submission deadline
February 2, 2015: Notification of acceptance
April 18/19, 2015 (tbd.): Workshop

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Sebastian Deterding (contact), Adrian Cheok, Jussi Holopainen, Andrés Lucero, Chulhong Min, Annika Waern, Steffen P. Walz

CFP: Work on the Move

Work on the Move

Monday 16th March 2015

Lancaster House Hotel, Lancaster, UK

Position statements due 26th January 2015 (see below)

It is widely recognised that non-formal learning or tacit knowledge is associated with the context of the workplace but what happens when this workplace is not static? What happens when workers go on the move? What are the rhetorics and material practices that bond work to place and how are these disrupted (and hence accounted for) when work goes on the move?

Mobile work has been widely studied within the field of mobilities research (Ferguson, 2011, Hislop, 2012, Nóvoa, 2012). Following the pervasive use of mobile technologies in both work and private lives, highly complex technological environments have been established around Work on the Move. Yet, as Kesselring (2014) stated in a recent issue of Mobilities, "There are many mobile jobs that do without mobile devices but are highly mobile." These work practices are frequently those, not driven by a compulsion to proximity, but a necessity of proximity, the obligation for face-to-face, body-to-body contact, such as paramedic work, emergency response or cosmetic practices.

But what ties these work practices back to organisational bases or places? Corporate Mobilities Regimes, as conceptualised by Kesselring (2014), govern the mobility practice of its members within and on behalf of a company. They discipline mobile subjects by means of a framework for action that dictates who is allowed to move, how and under which terms. But there are other elements within these regimes that need to be considered when looking at Work on the Move: specifically the ways in which principles, norms and rules emerge to form work practices on the move. Such 'technologies of control' can take the form of plans or protocols (physical or virtual) that shape, influence and control but also facilitate, enable and authorize mobile work to take place. In one example of mobile work, that of paramedic practice, protocols can be seen to provide a framework for implementing medical oversight of care (Anantharaman, 2012), legitimizing the paramedic work as they travel between organisational bases and their sites of implementation. It is hypothesised that the introduction of technologies allows for increased remoteness, on one hand, and forms of proximate control and direction on the other.

Inspired by recent mobilities scholarship in both crisis response and mobile work, this one-day workshop aims to bring together relevant participants including academics, researchers, practitioners, policy makers, technology producers and users to discuss Work on the Move. Specifically the aim is to discuss the transference of work from 'organisational bases' to other arenas and what it means when work practices, protocols, people and technologies move from outside of organisational bases.

Position statements are invited on (but are not limited to) the following workshop areas:

• Organisational identities on the move;
• Protocols on the move;
• Cultural imaginaries on the move;
• Technoscientific interventions on the move;
• The role of corporate mobility regimes in maintaining social ties on the move.

Position statements should be no longer than one side of A4. These will be reviewed by the workshop organisers and, in the event of over-subscription, statements will be accepted to give the broadest coverage of workshop topics. Attendees will be required to give a short presentation outlining their position. The workshop will aim to balance presentations with plenary sessions and opportunities for networking.

Please send you position statements to: l.a.wood@lancaster.ac.uk by 26th January 2015.

Timescales

Deadline for submission of position statements: 26th January 2015.

Notification of acceptance: 2nd February 2015.

Workshop: Monday 16th March 2015.

References

ANANTHARAMAN, G. 2012. Standards and standardization in paramedic protocols. Australian Journal of Paramedicine, 2.

FERGUSON, H. 2011. Mobilities of welfare: The case of social work. In: BUSCHER, M., URRY, J. & WITCHGER, K. (eds.) Mobile Methods. London: Routledge.

HISLOP, D. 2012. Driving, Communicating and Working: Understanding the Work-related Communication Behaviours of Business Travellers on Work-related Car Journeys. Mobilities, 8, 220-237.

KESSELRING, S. 2014. Corporate Mobilities Regimes. Mobility, Power and the Socio-geographical Structurations of Mobile Work. Mobilities, 1-21.

NÓVOA, A. 2012. Musicians on the Move: Mobilities and Identities of a Band on the Road. Mobilities, 7, 349-368.

CFP: The 9th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

The 9th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-15)
Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

CONFERENCE WEBSITE
http://icwsm.org/2015/

• Workshop Proposals Due: December 15, 2014
• Paper Abstracts Due: January 18, 2015 (by 11:59 pm AOE)
• Full Papers Due: January 23, 2015 (by 11:59 pm AOE)
• Acceptance Notification: March 9, 2015
• Conference: May 26-29, 2015 in Oxford, UK

SUMMARY SUBMISSION GUIDELINE
Full paper format: Full paper submissions to ICWSM are recommended to be 8 pages long, and must be at most 10 pages long, including figures and references. The final camera-ready length (between 8-10 pages) for each full paper in the proceedings will be at the discretion of the program chairs. All papers must follow AAAI formatting guidelines.

Poster and demo paper format: Poster paper submissions to ICWSM must be 4 pages long, including figures and references. Demo paper submissions to ICWSM must be 2 pages long, including figures and references. All papers must be follow AAAI formatting guidelines.

Anonymity: Paper submissions to ICWSM must be anonymized.

Social science track with only abstracts in the proceedings: We will be continuing the “social science” track at ICWSM-15 following its successful debut in 2013. This option is for researchers in social science who wish to submit full papers without publication in the conference proceedings. While papers in this track will not be published, we expect these submissions to describe the same high-quality and complete work as the main track submissions. Papers accepted to this track will be full presentations integrated with the conference, but they will be published only as abstracts in the conference proceedings.

DISCIPLINES

Computational approaches to social media research including

• Natural language processing
• Text / data mining
• Machine learning
• Image / multimedia processing
• Graphics and visualization
• Distributed computing
• Graph theory and graphical models
• Human-computer interaction

Social science approaches to social media research including

• Psychology
• Sociology and social network analysis
• Communication
• Political science
• Economics
• Anthropology
• Media studies and journalism
• Interdisciplinary approaches to social media research combining computational algorithms and social science methodologies

TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA include

• Weblogs (posts, comments, and/or social shares)
• Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn)
• Microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Tumblr)
• Wiki-based knowledge sharing sites (e.g., Wikipedia)
• Social news sites and websites of news media (e.g., Huffington Post)
• Forums, mailing lists, newsgroups
• Community media sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Instagram)
• Social Q & A sites (e.g., Quora, Yahoo Answers)
• User reviews (e.g., Yelp, Amazon.com)
• Social curation sites (e.g., Reddit, Pinterest)
• Location-based social networks (e.g., Foursquare)

TOPICS INCLUDE (BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO)

• Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of social media
• Analysis of the relationship between social media and mainstream media
• Qualitative and quantitative studies of social media
• Centrality/influence of social media publications and authors
• Ranking/relevance of blogs and microblogs; web page ranking based on weblogs
• Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise and authority discovery
• Collaborative filtering
• Trust; reputation; recommendation systems
• Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and visualization
• Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction, linguistic analyses of social media behavior
• Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification
• Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting
• Measuring predictability of real world phenomena based on social media, e.g., spanning politics, finance, and health
• New social media applications; interfaces; interaction techniques
• Social innovation and effecting change through social media
• Social media usage on mobile devices; location, human mobility, and behavior
• Organizational and group behavior mediated by social media; interpersonal communication mediated by social media
• Studies of digital humanities (culture, history, arts) using social media

General Chair
Daniele Quercia, Yahoo! Labs Barcelona

Local Chair
Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute

Program Co-Chairs
Meeyoung Cha, KAIST
Cecilia Mascolo, University of Cambridge
Christian Sandvig, University of Michigan

CFP: Information Technology and City Life

Information Technology and City Life // CSCW 2015 WORKSHOP

Saturday March 14 & Sunday March 15, 2015 | Vancouver, BC, Canada

Part of the 18th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Our aim is to facilitate a session that encourages computer scientists, industry professionals, academic researchers, architects, urban planners, government officials, hackers, artists, and other interested participants to work together to explore timely questions relating to Information Technology and City Life.

More information here: http://citytech.apps-1and1.com/

SUBMISSIONS

We accept two types of submissions: (1) original research or work-in-progress and (2) project idea that includes a description of a problem and possible solution (such as tool) that might be developed as part of this workshop.

All contributions must be submitted as PDF files. This workshop accepts research or work-in-progress papers (no longer than 2 pages) or position papers (no longer than 2 pages). All papers must be submitted by the deadlines provided below and formatted in CHI Extended Abstract, camera-ready style. All submitted contributions will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation by the program committee. All accepted submissions must be presented during the workshop. Please submit papers to citytechcscw15@gmail.com

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: December 15, 2014

Paper acceptance notifications: January 15, 2015

Organizers:

Elizabeth Daly, IBM Research Lab Dublin

Sheena Erte, DePaul University

Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh

Gary Hsieh, University of Washington

Cliff Lampe, University of Michigan

Claudia Lopez, University of Pittsburgh

Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Microsoft Research

Daniele Quercia, Yahoo! Labs Barcelona

Raz Schwartz, Facebook Research

Amy Voida, Indiana University Indianapolis

CFP: 6th International Workshop on Modeling Social Media

CALL FOR PAPERS
6th International Workshop on Modeling Social Media (MSM'2015)

Behavioral Analytics in Social Media, Big Data and the Web

to be held on May 19, 2015, Florence, Italy
co-located with ACM WWW 2015

http://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/ws/msm2015/
--------------------------------------------------------------

Important Dates:
================
Submission Deadline: Jan 24, 2015 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
Notification of Acceptance: Feb 22, 2015
Camera-Ready Versions Due: Mar 8, 2015
Workshop date: May 19, 2015

Workshop Organizers:
====================
Martin Atzmueller, University of Kassel, Kassel,
Germany;atzmueller@cs.uni-kassel.de
Alvin Chin, Microsoft, Beijing, China; alvin.chin@utoronto.ca
Christoph Trattner, Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
Trondheim, Norway; trattner.christoph@gmail.com

For the 6h International Workshop on Modeling Social Media, we aim to attract researchers from all over the world working in the field of behavioral analytics using web and social media data. Behavioral analytics is an important topic, e.g., concerning web applications as well as extensions in mobile and ubiquitous applications, for understanding user behavior. We would also like to invite researchers in the data and web mining community to lend their expertise to help to increase our understanding of the web and social media.

Thus, we invite submissions which may include the following topics, but are not limited to:

Behavioral analytics methods or frameworks for social media, big data and the web

• approaches for personalization and recommendations
• methods for social structure and community discovery
• methods for tie strength or link prediction
• methods for extracting and understanding user and group behavior
• methods for extracting and understanding user and group behavior
• methods for predicting user behavior
• methods for user modelling and profiling
• applications of behavioural analytics
• privacy and security in behavioural analytics
• applications of any of the above methods and technologies

The goal of this workshop is to apply behavioral analytics approaches and algorithms on social media, big data and the web.

Hence, the workshop aims to attract and discuss various novel aspects of personalization, recommendation, community discovery, profiling and prediction from social media.

Submissions: We solicit full research papers (4-6 pages), and short papers (1-4 pages) both in the ACM conference paper style.

Papers should be submitted in EasyChair to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msm2015

Program Committee:
==================
Luca Aiello, Yahoo! Labs Barcelona, Spain
Robin Burke, de Paul, USA
Shlomo Berkovsky, NICTA, Australia
Polo Chau, Georgia Tech, USA
Guanling Chen, University of Massachussetts Lowell, USA
Daniel Gayo-Avello, University of Oviedo, Spain
Michael Granitzer, University of Passau, Germany
Bin Guo, Northwestern Polytechnic University, USA
Ido Guy, IBM Research, Israel
Eelco Herder, L3S, Germany
Sharon Hsiao, Columbia University, USA
Javier Luis Canovas Izquierdo, INRIA, France
Thomas Kannampallil, University of Texas, USA
Mark Kibanov, University of Kassel, Germany
Simon Koo, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
Dominik Kowald, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Florian Lemmerich, University of Wuerzburg
Harold Liu, Beijing Institute of Technology, China
Leandro Balby Marinho, Federal University of Campina Grande, Brasil
Kjetil Norvag, NTNU, Norway
Denis Parra, PUC, Chile
Christoph Scholz, University of Kassel, Germany
Shaghayegh Sahebi, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Yang Su, Fudan University, China
Claudia Wagner, GESIS, DE
Shengdong Zhao, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Arkaitz Zubiaga, New York City University, USA

Proceedings:
============
Contributions will be included in the Companion volume of the ACM WWW2015 conference, which will be published by ACM and included in the ACM Digital Library.
However, to make that happen at least one author of the accepted paper has to register. At the time of submission of the final camera-ready copy, authors will have to indicate the already registered person for that publication.

Any paper published by the ACM, IEEE, etc. which can be properly cited constitutes research which must be considered in judging the novelty of a WWW submission, whether the published paper was in a conference, journal, or workshop. Therefore, any paper previously published as part of a WWW workshop must be referenced and suitably extended with new content to qualify as a new submission to the Research Track at the WWW conference.

Submission guidelines:
======================
All submitted papers must

• be written in English;
• contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses;
• be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) with a font size no smaller than 9pt;
• be in PDF (make sure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and formatted for US Letter size;
• occupy no more than six pages, including the abstract, references, and appendices.

It is the authors responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format.
Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected without review.

All submissions must be entered into the reviewing system: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msm2015

Contact:
========
Martin Atzmueller - atzmueller@cs.uni-kassel.de
Alvin Chin - alvin.chin@utoronto.ca
Christoph Trattner - trattner.christoph@gmail.com

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CFP: Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government

Call for Papers
CeDEM 2015 - Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government
20-22 May 2015, Danube University Krems, Austria, www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem

Track: Connected Smart City

Chair: Carolin Schröder (Technical University Berlin, DE), Julia Glidden (21c Consultancy UK), Norbert Kersting (University of Münster, DE)

This track provides a platform for the various living labs, initiatives and projects that work on or with concepts of "Smart Cities". It aims at sharing experiences as well as test results and to further investigate relations of innovative technologies and democratic societies.
Contributions are especially appreciated on the following topics:

• Becoming a smart city: Best practices, failures & practical challenges;
• Successful technologies for encouraging citizen participation;
• Successful technologies for integrating all dimensions of human, collective, and artificial intelligence within the city;
• Smartness vs. Openness? Open data & Big data, Usability & Accessability, the internet of things and co-production;
• Do smart cities need smart people? Relations of innovative technologies, democratic societies & concepts of "Smartness";

Deadline for the submission of full papers, reflections: 8 December 2014
Further information on the conference: www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem

CFP: What’s New about New Media? The Technology of Protest Past and Present

Symposium

“What’s New about New Media? The Technology of Protest Past and Present”

Department of History
Carleton University, Ottawa Canada
April 23-24, 2015

From the G8 demonstrations to the Occupy Movements, Idle No More, and revolutions in the Middle East, the last few years have witnessed a phenomenal upswing in the use of social media in popular protest. Social technology has played an important role in mobilizing grassroots opposition and, according to some scholars and pundits, it has served to politicize a broader base, bringing about greater participation in and new forms of civic action. Activists use platforms like Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to raise consciousness around lightning-rod issues. New technologies aid in the organization of demonstrations. They help mobilize emotions, map out logistics, and after all is said and done, they catalogue and document opposition success and further challenges. Social media’s democratizing potential is not without its detractors, however, and alongside concerns for the protection of privacy and surveillance, skeptics question whether networked publics really can serve as meaningful spaces of protest and opposition.

In lending shape to everyday opposition, cataloguing images of excess and exuberance, and circulating them in networked publics, there can be no doubt Web 2.0 is writing a history of the present. Yet aside from the thorny issue of impact, it is worth asking how new is new media in the way it shapes protest and opposition? This two-day symposium takes a longue durée approach to this question. It aims to bring together early modern historians with modernists and media/communications scholars to interrogate what is in fact new, different, and unique about how “old” and “new” media have structured, popularized, given voice to, and helped mobilize protest and opposition across time and space.

We will discuss pre-circulated papers of 15 pages in length. Each paper should demonstrate a conceptual engagement with the interplay of time and place-specific media and their relation to public sentiment and opposition. We will also have two keynote addresses, one from a communications scholar, the other from an historian.

Themes may include:

• vernacular forms of protest across time and media
• protest and public engagement, diverse publics, counterpublics
• protest and affect
• protest as performance, the staging of opposition, counter protest and solidarity
• visualizing, spatializing, or mapping violence, resistance, and identity
• media, self, and subjectivity – forging activist or oppositional selves
• networks of opposition and collusion
• rethinking the local, the regional, and the global
• mediatized protest: chronicle, archive, database, scrapbook
• media, protest, and public/social memory

Please forward a short CV and a 1-2 page paper abstract to the following address by December 15th, 2014.

CFP: EMERGINGDOCUMENTARY PRACTICES

CALL FOR PAPERS,PROPOSALS AND CREATIVE WORK


EMERGINGDOCUMENTARY PRACTICES

Symposiumand Exhibition

Temple University, Friday April 3, 2015

An interdisciplinary one-day symposium and exhibition about how emerging technologies are transforming nonfiction image-making practices in cinema, art and ethnography.

Deadline For Proposals: January 12, 2015.

The Department of Film andMedia Arts (FMA) at Temple University is delighted to host a one-day interdisciplinary symposium on Emerging Documentary Practices. The symposium is particularly focused on documentary forms that use interactivity, locative and mobile technologies in innovative ways to transform the concepts and practices of documentary cinema and media arts.

The symposium welcomes documentary practitioners from across fields of social sciences, humanities and arts, from ethnographers to eco-poets. Interweaving choices of content and of form, a new generation of practitioners is reaching across creative and scholarly disciplines. This symposium embraces this discourse on theoretical and practical levels. The conversions are presented concurrently with an exhibition of documentary works using interactivity and other innovative practices.

Each session will be launched with a 15 minute keynote. Each panelist will have the opportunity to present an elaborated 5 minute "proposition/question/provocation" to the panel to stimulate open conversation. Proposals will be peer reviewed.

The symposium is complemented by a multi-kiosk exhibition offering speakers and others opportunities to exhibit works in the curated, peer reviewed show. The kiosks that will be available for viewing on the day and throughout the week. Longer papers supporting the discussions may also be linked, and participants may later be invited for to offer submissions for publication. The symposium is sponsored by TempleUniversity's Department of Film and Media Arts, the Center for Humanities at Temple(CHAT) and Temple Libraries.

Primary themes include:

• SPATIAL PRACTICES
  e.g. geo-spatial mapping and storytelling; actual and augmented sites of memory; spatial poetics;infrastructure, industrialization and climate change; actual and imaginary cities
• SOCIAL PRACTICES
  e.g. forging community; bringing diversity and indigenous voices;oral histories and imagined futures; performing and protesting through social media; user generated works.
• EMBODIED PERFORMANCE
  e.g. computer materiality and embodied actions of making, viewing; story-telling through web series, live feeds and digital happenings; practical implications of usin galternative and interactive software like Korkasow, Mozilla Popcorn, Zeega, or Moviestorm upon how stories are told and image edited; the body as a source of data; disembodiment and narrative fracture.

PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS

Proposals for participation, short papers (5 minute "proposition/question/provocation")and the digital exhibition of works on the dedicated kiosks should consist of a proposal statement  (max 500 words), a URL if available/relevant, and brief biographic statement (max 150 words).

Submissions should be sent in electronic form to:  edocs@temple.edu

Questions can be directed to FMA Faculty Organizers Roderick Coover and LeAnn Erickson

Conference registration will occur in February. Conference fee is $40 and includes lunch. The fee is waived for Temple students and faculty.

CFP: CeDEM15 Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government

The deadline for the submissions is nearing quickly (8 December 2014), so we kindly ask you to disseminate the CeDEM15 CfP in your networks, to your students (we have a PhD Colloquium and grants for them too), colleagues, etc. You are welcome to use the text below, forward the whole CfP or focus on your track in particular (copy & paste from the cfp)! Will you be submitting a paper?

CeDEM15 Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government
20 - 22 May 2015

 www.donau-uni.ac.at/cedem

 The international Conference for e-Democracy and Open Government brings together e-democracy, e-participation and open government specialists working in academia, politics, government and business from to critically analyse the innovations, issues, ideas and challenges in the networked societies of the digital age.

Tracks at CeDEM15 include:

• E-Democracy and E-Participation
• E-Voting
• Bottom-Up Movements
• Social and Mobile Media for Public Administration
• Open Collaborative Government
• Democracy, Globalization and Migration
• Connected Smart City
• Open Data, Transparency and Open Innovation
• Technology and Architecture
• Self-governance in Complex Networks
• Rethinking Information Visualization for the People
• Freedom and Ethics in Digital Societies
• Design and Co-creation for E-democracy
• Citizen's Participation in Democratic Governance Processes through ICT in Africa
• Open Access

 ..... at CeDEM15 you can also submit papers for the:

•  PhD Colloquium
• Workshop Proposals
• Reflections
• Open Space

 .... and we are pleased to offer PhD students bursaries:

•  3 bursaries for the best PhD submissions: a 3-day conference fee waiver and accommodation at the Kolping Hotel (Krems) for the duration of the CeDEM15 conference
• 3 bursaries: a 3-day conference fee waiver http://bit.ly/1mqhBPV

 Our confirmed keynotes are:
 Alon Peled  (Hebew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
 Theresa A. Pardo (University at Albany, USA)
 Marijn Janssen (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
 Shauneen Furlong (University of Toronto and University of Ottawa, Canada)

 .... and finally:

•  Co-located with CeDEM15 will be the 4th SharePSI Workshop. Share-PSI 2.0 is a EU funded project for the exchange of experience and ideas around implementing open data policies in the public sector. Attendees of CeDEM 15 will be granted free entrance to the SharePSI public meetings and presentations. For more information about SharePSI see the projects website http://www.w3.org/2013/share-psi/

 Important Dates:

• Deadline for the submission of all papers, workshop proposals, reflections: 8 December 2014
• Notification of acceptance: 9 February 2015
• Camera-ready paper submission: 2 March 2015

CFP: Citizenship, Social Media, and Big Data

Social Science Computer Review Call for Submissions:
Special Issue on "Citizenship, Social Media, and Big Data"

Call for Papers:
The Internet and social media have become the primary outlets for many citizens to consume and share news and political information, express themselves politically, and engage in the political process.  Much of this online political behavior leaves digital traces that can be aggregated into large-scale data sets that provide scholars new opportunities to understand the nature of citizenship in an era of digital media.

The Social Science Computer Review calls for submissions to a special issue focusing on "Citizenship, Social Media, and Big Data".  The special issue is seeking full-length manuscripts that apply big data and a social scientific approach to explore how citizens use media, in particular social media, for political purposes.  The special issue is open to a variety of topics that include, but are not limited to, citizens' engagement with news and political information, the intersection of citizenship and journalism, political discussion and expression, as well as political participation, activism, and protest.  The special issue also welcomes manuscripts on topics related to the call that introduce new methods for analyzing big data.

Important Dates:
February 1, 2015: Submission deadline (full paper)
April 15, 2015: Authors notified of editorial decision
May 15, 2015: Revised manuscripts due
June 15, 2015: Authors receive 2nd round of comments from reviewers (if necessary)
July 15, 2015: Final version of manuscript due
September 15, 2015: Authors' approval of copyedited proofs due
November 1, 2015: Expected online publication date
April 1, 2016: Expected print publication date

Submission Process:
Manuscripts should be submitted via email before the indicated deadline above to homero.gil.de.zuniga@univie.ac.at
Please use subject SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW in the email.

About SSCR:
Social Science Computer Review (SSCR) is an interdisciplinary journal covering social science instructional and research applications of computing, as well as societal impacts of information technology.  It has an impact factor of 1.542 and was ranked 11 out 92 interdisciplinary social science journals in the 2013 Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Report.

About the Special Issue Editor:
Uni.-Prof. Dr. Homero Gil de Zúñiga holds the Medienwandel Professorship at University of Vienna, where he also directs the Media Innovation Lab (MiLab). His research addresses the influence of new technologies and digital media over people's daily lives, as well as the effect of such use on the overall democratic process.

CFP: #SMSociety15: Social Media & Society Conference

The 2015 Social Media & Society Conference (#SMSociety15)

July 27-29, Toronto

Call for Submissions

Academic research on social media is growing exponentially across various disciplines including: Communications, Information / Library Science, Computer Science, Business, Sociology, Education, Psychology, Health and others. The Web of Science alone indexed nearly 5,000 journal and conference publications over the last decade. This growing body of research revealed many interesting factors about social media platforms, their users, and a glimpse of our society at large. But are we any closer to understanding the broader implications of social media on our increasing networked society?

The 2015 Social Media & Society Conference (#SMSociety15) invites scholarly and original submissions that build on the previous work and critically evaluate the role of social media for social and political change, community engagement, marketing, new forms of governance, support of individuals and organizations in domains such as business, information, management, public administration, academia, health, and journalism (just to mention a few). We are also calling for submissions that develop and apply novel methods and theories to collect, analyze, and visualize social media data as well as those that discuss ethical and privacy implications of using big and small data. We welcome both quantitative and qualitative work in the broad area of Social Media & Society that crosses interdisciplinary boundaries and expands our understanding of the current and future trends in social media.

Whether you are just starting a new research project or ready to report on the final results, you will find that #SMSociety15 is a great venue for you! The 2015 conference invites a wide range of submissions:

• short papers on completed or well-developed projects (Due: March 2, 2015)
• work-in-progress paper abstracts (Due: April 10, 2015),
• panel discussions (Due: March 2, 2015)
• poster presentations (Due: May 1, 2015).

New to this year, we are also calling for proposals to host:

• half-day workshops (Due: February 2, 2015) on a well-defined area or technical tutorials that will examine a particular method or tool for the analysis of social media data in more detail

PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITIES
All accepted short papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings by the ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (ICPS). Authors of accepted top papers will be invited to submit their full papers to the special issue of the Information, Communication & Society journal (published by Taylor & Francis).

BACKGROUND
The Social Media & Society Conference is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. Now, in its 6th year, the 2015 Conference will be held in Toronto, Canada from July 27 to 29, 2015. From its inception, the conference has focused on the best practices for studying the impact and implications of social media on society. Organized by the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, the conference provides attendees an opportunity to exchange ideas, present their original research, learn about recently completed and work-in progress studies, and strengthen connections with their peers. The 2014 conference hosted over 200 attendees, featured research from 238 authors across several fields from 21 different countries.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Social Media & Small Data

• Case Studies of Online Communities Formed on Social Media
• Case Studies of Offline Communities that Rely on Social Media
• Sampling Issues
• Value of Small Data

 Social Media & Big Data

• Visualization of Social Media Data
• Social Media Data Mining
• Scalability Issues & Social Media Data
• Social Media Analytics
• Ethics of Big Data

 Social Media Impact on Society

•  Private Self/Public Self
•  The Sharing/Attention Economy
•  Virality & Memes
•  Political Mobilization & Engagement
•  Social Media & Health
•  Social Media & Business (Marketing, PR, HR, Risk Management, etc.)
•  Social Media & Academia (Alternative Metrics, Learning Analytics, etc.)
•  Social Media & Public Administration
•  Social Media & the News

 Theories & Methods

•  Qualitative & Quantitative Approaches
•  Opinion Mining & Sentiment Analysis
•  Social Network Analysis
•  Theoretical Models for Studying, Analysing and Understanding Social Media

 Online/Offline Communities

•  Trust & Credibility in Social Media
•  Online Community Detection
•  Influential User Detection
•  Online Identity

 Social Media & Mobile

•  App-ification of the Society
•  Privacy & Security Issues in the Mobile World
•  Apps for the Social Good
•  Networking Apps

 PROGRAM COMMITTEE
 The list of the Program Committee members is available at https://socialmediaandsociety.com/?page_id=1346

 CONFERENCE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
 Anatoliy Gruzd
 Associate Professor, Ted Rogers School of Management
 Director, Social Media Lab
 Ryerson University, Canada
 Twitter: @gruzd

Research Position: New Project on Anti-Hatred Tweets

Research Position: New Project on Anti-Hatred Tweets

The Dangerous Speech Project <http://www.voicesthatpoison.org> works to find and test pro-speech methods for diminishing harmful speech - or its effects. It is directed by Prof. Susan Benesch <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/sbenesch> of American University and the
Berkman <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2014/03/benesch>
Center.

The successful candidate will work on a new two-year project to identify, collect, and analyze the effect of ‘counterspeech’ (speech rebutting hateful, hostile, or harmful Tweets), in collaboration with Prof. Derek Ruths <http://www.derekruths.com/> of McGill University, who directs
the Network Dynamics Lab <http://networkdynamics.org/> there.

The researcher will perform systematic content analysis to map hateful Tweets and responses to them, using both qualitative textual analysis and quantitative content and conversation analysis. Much of this work will be done in close collaboration with a computer science graduate student who
will be responsible for the development of automated detection and filtering tools. The successful candidate will be comfortable working closely with computational researchers, and with large datasets collected from online social platforms. Familiarity with data analysis tools (e.g. Excel, R, Python) and some knowledge of statistics are welcome but not required.

This position is ideal for junior scholars in Master's or PhD programs in Communication, Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Information Studies, and related fields who want to develop and hone their research skills. Candidates must be comfortable establishing research direction, asking questions, managing time, and pursuing the work with limited supervision. Strong skills in writing, organization, and academic research are essential. There may be opportunities for co-authorship of papers in peer-reviewed journals and presentations of findings at relevant

conferences.

The researcher will be paid $15-25 hourly, depending on qualifications, with flexible hours and no residency requirement. It may require occasional travel for 2-4 days, to meetings with project staff and academic conferences, with expenses paid by the project, which is funded through 2016.

To apply, please send an email to  sbenesch@cyber.law.harvard.edu

with the subject “RA Application” and include the following:

• CV or resume
• Writing sample (preferably a literature review or scholarly article)
• Links to online presence (e.g., blog, homepage, Twitter etc.)
• The names and email addresses of two employers or professors who we may contact as references
• A cover letter that includes citizenship/legal residency status, number of hours available to work per week, current city of residence, available start date, current student status, and any other practical consideration that may be important for us to know

We are committed to diversity in our team and strongly encourage people of color, of diverse gender identities, women, and LGBTQIA persons to apply.