CFP: Social Media and Communities

Social Media and Communities -- a "mini-track" at the
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, (HICSS-51)
January 3-6, 2018, Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Full paper submission deadline, June 15

We call for papers that address social networks and communities supported and/or complemented by social media for work, learning, socializing, economic and/or political processes, and/or that address theory, design, practices, use or evaluation of such social media use. ‘Communities’ is taken in a broad sense, including communities of practice, epistemic communities, or communities of inquiry, as well as fully virtual communities, and social media use that supports or complements geographically based community. We particularly encourage papers that:

• advance our understanding of social network growth, formation, structure and outcomes through social media;
• explore how socio-technical affordances relate to social media use and outcomes;
• evaluate design of social media technologies and practices for effective community development and maintenance; and
• develop theories, models and principles of social media design, use and outcomes.

We encourage the submission of exploratory and theoretical papers, as well as empirical studies.

HICSS 51 and the "Big Island"

The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, in its 51st year, is one of the longstanding scientific conferences and is highly ranked among information systems conferences. Diverse disciplines unified by a focus on information technologies are woven together in a matrix structure of tracks and themes. By attending HICSS you are not only reaching the audience of your track and mini-track; you also have the opportunity to learn about what is happening in related fields and meet leaders in those fields. Other mini-tracks within the Digital and Social Media track are particularly relevant: see http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-51/digital-and-social-media/

With five of the world's seven climate zones, and a mixture of Hawaiian and immigrant cultures, the "Big Island" of Hawaii offers diverse outdoor activities, good food, and cultural activities.

Please see http://www.hicss.org/ for conference, venue and submission information. Papers are due June 15, 2017

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Dan Suthers (Primary Contact)
University of Hawaii at Manoa
suthers@hawaii.edu

Karine Nahon
University of Washington and the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya
karineb@uw.edu

Mobile Utopia Bonfire School

Call for Applications
Mobile Utopia Bonfire School
29 October - 2 November 2017, CeMoRe, Lancaster University
http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/cemore-bonfire/

Most people are unaware of the ‘systemness’
of their everyday practices (Urry 2016:73)

From Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to John Urry’s What is the future? (2016), utopia has been a powerful means to explore how societies change. Using utopia as a method to explore and contest futures is a powerful approach (Levitas 2013). It is at once critical, ethical, creative, and integrative.

The Mobile Utopia Bonfire School brings together senior and junior scholars from a range of different disciplines (history, social science, art, design, policy, engineering and more) to explore how futures and utopia as method relate to their research. How does ‘mobilising’ utopia as method help us understand social futures, current everyday practices and their relation to multi-scalar, intergenerational, more-than-human futures? How might ‘mobilising’ utopia as method provide deeper insight and creative leverage? Read more about the background here.

The Mobile Utopia Bonfire School is organised on the fringe of the Mobile Utopia: Pasts, presents, futures Conference – jointly organised by Cemore, T2M, and Cosmobilities, 2-5 November 2017 at Lancaster University. A range of senior staff members, including Simon Bainbridge, Monika Büscher, Joe Deville, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Malene Freudendal Pedersen, Kevin Hannam, Carlos Lopez Galviz, Mimi Sheller will participate. For an up-to-date list, please check here.

To participate in the Bonfire School, applicants should submit a 300 word abstract that describes their research, addressing the following questions: What are you researching? Why? What does or could utopia as a concept or method do for you? Please complete the Application Form available on the website.

Important Dates: 05 June 2017
Submission of Applications: 12 June 2017
Notification of Acceptance: 15 June 2017
Early Bird Registration closes: 25 August 2017
Registration closes :Participation is limited to 25 PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, artists, practitioners.

The Bonfire School provides opportunities to participate in a range of activities, including:
Presentation-based discussions: A speedy, fun series of 3 minute presentations about your research - What are you researching? Why? What does or could utopia as a concept or method do for you? Student, staff, postdoc presentations will be mixed, followed by discussion.

Master classes: (after Erik Olin Wright) Learning in small groups of one member of staff and 1-3 students/postdocs. Each student/postdoc has a total of ten minutes, divided roughly evenly between the student telling the senior researcher something puzzling about their research and them responding with off-the-cuff comments and suggestions. The point here is NOT for students to give a five minute summary of their research, but rather to identify a problem in need of feedback: something puzzling or confusing; a bottleneck in the project; a difficult (perhaps annoying) objection that has been raised by someone; a mysterious finding that doesn’t make sense; an intractable methodological problem; an ethical issue about the research. The senior researcher questions, comments, provides advice, constructive critique. These initial exchanges are followed by discussion.

Mentoring: In pairs or threes staff/students/postdocs discuss successes and failures related to the practicalities of research and career.

Publishing Pleasures: A one to one discussion of publication prospects and practices with Gerhard Boomgarden, senior editor, Routledge Sociology Series in a ‘publication surgery’ session. Please note: Participants wishing to take advantage of this must send in a short outline of a book proposal by 1st October to Aurora Trujillo. This can be rough. To see what might need to go into a book proposal, consult the Changing Mobilities Book Series Form (links available on the website). Scheduling of the sessions will be on a first come, first served basis.

Writing Exchange: Taking inspiration from the activities at the Bonfire school, participants will have the opportunity to produce and exchange a 500-1000 word piece of writing for constructive critique with other participants.

The Mobile Utopia Experiment: As part of the Cemore|T2M|Cosmobilities 2017 Conference (2-5 November), there will be a creative experimental pre-enactment of mobile utopia, with various activities. Participants in the Bonfire School will participate in the experiment. Please visit the website for more information about the experiment.

For further detail, please also see the Preliminary Programme on the website.

Registration Fees
Early Bird (including all meals & facilities): £350
After 15th June 2017: £450

Campus accommodation is available at a reduced rate (around £50 per person/night, including breakfast). Please note that Registration and accommodation for the Conference are separate. We’d be delighted to welcome you. (Early registration is recommended).

Bursaries and Travel Grants
A small number of bursaries and travel grants are available. Allocation is competitive and based on peer review of the research abstract submission. Please complete the Travel Grant Application Form on the website by 05 June 2017. Decisions will be made by 12 June.

Note that the Bonfire School is one of several events and we would be delighted to welcome you for the whole week:
1. Take part in all of it, the Bonfire School, the Mobile Utopia Experiment and the Mobile Utopia Conference 29th October - 5th November 2017
2. Join the Bonfire School to discuss your research and participate in the Mobile Utopia Experiment (you don't have to bring an experiment) 29th October - 2nd November 2017
3. Make a Mobile Utopia Experiment and bring it to Lancaster 1-2nd November 2017

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

With best wishes,

Monika, Carlos and Ian

Monika Büscher, Professor of Sociology
Director Centre for Mobilities Research
Associate Director for the Institute for Social Futures
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, LA1 4YW
Office Hours: By Arrangement - Bowland North B14

CFP:“Digital parenting"

Call for chapters proposal: “Digital parenting"

The book Digital parenting: the challenges for families in the digital age focuses on the opportunities and challenges of digital media for families and changing parenting practices.

Families with young children are usually early and enthusiastic adopters of new technologies, which, in turn shape the family’s communication practices and media consumption habits. The appropriation of digital media into families’ everyday lives is influenced by parenting styles or ethics (Clark, 2013). While providing means for remote parenting and coordinating family life, new technologies pose new challenges to parents, as the practice of sharenting – the oversharing of children’s pictures and personal information (see Blum-Ross & Livingstone, 2017) - and the increasing reliance on the internet and parenting apps for (health) advice, well exemplify.

The pervasiveness of the internet and mobile media is giving rise to an emergent form of parenting, called “transcendent parenting” (Lim, 2016), whereby parents are faced with the challenges of transcending online-offline social interactions, the multi-media and multimodal environments, and the “timeless time” of parenting. Parents are variously equipped to face the increasing complexity of the digital world and its social and developmental consequences.
The book will explore how socio-economic differences, parenting cultures and parent’s imaginaries, all play a part in shaping the extent to which parents can navigate the contemporary internet and guide their children’s use. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

    •    Sharenting
    •    Mummy bloggers
    •    Parental imaginaries around the internet/touchscreens
    •    Parental mediation of the internet/mobile media (also through cross-cultural analysis)
    •    Changing parenting cultures
    •    The child effect
    •    Opportunities and challenges of the digital among rural families and/or immigrant families
    •    Parenting across generations, including reverse socialisation: grandparents, parents and children
    •    Digital parenting of children with special needs
    •    Digital parenting and health information

The target audience of this book will be composed by students, media professionals, practitioners and researchers working in the field of education, communication, digital art, children and youth studies, new literacy studies and media and information literacy. Contributions should take into account the diversity of target audience and facilitate flow in reading.

Giovanna Mascheroni, PhD, Senior Lecturer of Sociology of Communication and Culture, Department of Sociology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy, Cristina Ponte, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Sciences, FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, and Ana Jorge, PhD, Lecturer, Faculty of Human Sciences, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal, are the editors.

Publisher: Nordicom - Nordic Information Center for Media and Communication Research, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
http://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publikationer

Articles:
Between 3000 and 4000 words

Time Schedule:
Book Description + Call for chapters:  early May 2017
Submission of abstracts (500 words): 1st June 2017
Notification of acceptance/refusal: 1st July 2017
Full chapter submission: 15 October 2017
Editor’s feedback: early January 2018
Submission of final chapter: 28 February 2018
English Proof Reading: April 2018
Graphic Edition: April 2017
Graphic Design: Jul 2018
Print + pdf: September 2018

Submission Guidelines for Nordicom’s Publications will be sent to authors of selected abstracts.

Contact:
Ana Jorge | anajorge@fch.lisboa.ucp.pt
Giovanna Mascheroni | giovanna.mascheroni@unicatt.it
Cristina Ponte | cristina.ponte@fcsh.unl.pt
For questions regarding Nordicom:
Ingela Wadbring  | ingela.wadbring@nordicom.gu.se

Earn a Certificate in Social Media Analysis from Boston University w/ Gratis Access to Crimson Hexagon

Earn a Certificate in Social Media Analysis from Boston University w/ Gratis Access to Crimson Hexagon

Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

http://sites.bu.edu/social-media-analysis/

Making Social Media Matter is a hands-on, 3-day workshop designed to equip attendees with the knowledge and skills to quickly analyze and visualize data from popular social media platforms such as Twitter.

The tools demonstrated in this workshop for network analysis, machine learning, and geolocation are at the forefront of social media research and will equip attendees — even those with no computational training — with expert understanding of how to collect, analyze, visualize, and interpret social media data for internal and public use.

In addition to covering the theoretical bases of working with and modeling big data, the training in this workshop will include access to and use of leading data platforms, namely Crimson Hexagon, the Boston University Twitter Collection and Analysis Toolkit (BU-TCAT) and Gephi.

Media professionals, research analysts, scientists, college students, and anyone wanting to make sense of social media will benefit from attending this workshop. All participants that successfully complete this workshop will:

• Earn a Certificate in Social Media Analysis: Principles and Practices for Big Data from Boston University.
• Have free access for 3 weeks to the industry-leading ForSight data analysis platform from Crimson Hexagon.
• Receive training in exclusive data analysis tools including the BU-TCAT that can collect and analyze millions of units of social media content.
• Go beyond dashboards and dive deep into data to take their analytic skills to another level of conceptual and practical understanding.