CFP: The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?

The Digital Everyday: Exploration or Alienation?
Centre for Digital Culture at King's College London
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS


This international conference aims at exploring the digital everyday, understood as the transformation of everyday life practices brought about by digital technology. From how we buy, walk around, get a cab, love, break up, go to bed, meet new people and sexual partners to the way we rate services, turn on the fridge, exercise and eat, social media, apps, and Big Data are reshaping some of the most basic activities in our lives.


The conference will explore these digitally enabled transformations by looking at a number of domains affected by these shifts, for instance: of work and leisure, of friendship and love, of habits and routines. We will also explore a number of overarching dynamics and trends in the digital world that contribute to these transformations, including: processes of digital individualisation and aggregation; the elisions of spatial and temporal barriers; trends towards quantification and datafication; and the dialectic between control and alienation.


We invite participants from various intellectual traditions and streams of research including media studies, sociology, psychology, information science, computing and anthropology. Together, we will explore a number of key questions. How, for example, is digital transformation affecting everyday life? To what extent is this process one of increasing individualisation of social experience? Or might there be something more complex happening? What are the new psychological and social pathologies that result from the digital transformation of everyday life and from processes of datafication and quantification? Is digital technology allowing for new forms of control over our everyday life or is it increasing alienation, making us overly dependent on infrastructures beyond our grasp? Is digital technology contributing to extending our freedom to choose, or is it stifling us with an overabundance of options? Is it guiding us towards who we 'really' are or want to be, or is it plunging us into a hall of mirrors that only reinforces our isolation and narcissism? Is it facilitating exploration, serendipity and curiosity, or is it installing us into a pre-programmed and predictable world, into a filter bubble where choices can be more easily measured and manipulated?


Proposed paper abstracts may address the following topics: transformations of work patterns; changes in everyday life routine (sleep, meals, etc.); fitness and sport activity; love and sexual interactions; friendship and acquaintanceship; consumption and entertainment; sense of place and time; transportation and tourism; play and leisure.

The conference will comprise two plenary sessions and 4 breakout panels, and will host internationally acclaimed scholars as keynote speakers.


The conference will take on Saturday, 6th May 2017.

Abstract are due by 31 January 2017.


Abstracts should be 250 words maximum, and include the author(s) name and position, and a short title. They should be submitted via EasyChair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digitaleveryday17<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Feasychair.org%2Fconferences%2F%3Fconf%3Ddigitaleveryday17&h=6AQHINf_zAQF5f96Vs0kPgE-Au5AyzZQjg2PFYcyqEjy40Q&enc=AZP8YtbElwzbmlo4WWMQYu7LpGu22c9p3W4BC91uSOu3898OkxVxjxwi7Ayixk8q15ENaer9stlRZ224dQqiRBRsvh2BxIxJ8IE7aCVGnN4DStalFxPNkg08_DOi0FRodsqRzQX6Rw3FRnhIgWdO-rhbAgttDZjp_wEnqkTaFUti2UMNw5SIuWd3gp4X5bEAYiFTvxIKhbfQO-HDPan2DN0q&s=1>

Acceptance notices will be given on 28 February 2017.

Extended abstracts of 1,500 words are due on 15 April 2017 to be sent digitalculture@kcl.ac.uk

CFP: The Future of Journalism: Risks, Threats and Opportunities

The Future of Journalism: Risks, Threats and Opportunities

Thursday 10th and Friday 11th September 2015
Cardiff University, UK

Call for Papers


We are delighted to announce the fifth biennial conference - The Future of Journalism – to be hosted by the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies (JOMEC) at Cardiff University, UK. The 2015 conference theme will be ‘Risks, Threats and Opportunities.’

A selection of the research-based papers presented at the conference will be published in special issues of the peer-reviewed journals Digital Journalism, Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies. Sponsorship for the conference is provided by JOMEC and Routledge Taylor and Francis.

The plenary speakers will be Professor Jean Seaton and Professor Stephen D. Reese (their bios appear below).

This call for papers invites contributions from the international community of scholars of journalism studies, journalism practitioners, educators and trainers, media executives, trade unionists and media regulators. Papers focused on any aspect of the broad theme, ‘The Future of Journalism: Risks, Threats and Opportunities,’ are welcome, although priority will be given to those papers addressing one of the five sub-themes:

Journalism and Social Media. In the digital age of social networking, crowd-sourcing and ‘big data,’ how is journalism – and the role of the journalist – being redefined? How do we investigate the influence of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, and the like, on the gathering, reporting or consumption of news?

Journalists at Risk. Covering the world’s trouble spots has always posed acute challenges, but increasingly news organizations and their sources are being targeted in war, conflict or crisis situations. What are the key issues at stake to protect journalists’ safety and their right to report?

Journalism Under Surveillance. What does freedom of the press mean in a post-Snowden climate, when spying, leaks and whistleblowing are making news headlines around the world? What are the new forms of censorship confronting journalism today, and what emergent tactics will help it to speak truth to power?

Journalism and the Fifth Estate. At a time when the traditional ideals of the fourth estate risk looking outdated, if not obsolete, to what extent can we rely on citizen media to produce alternative, independent forms of news reporting?  How best to reform mainstream media institutions to make them more open, transparent and accountable to the public?

Journalism’s Values. How are journalism’s ethical principles and moral standards evolving in relation to the democratic cultures of communities locally, regionally, nationally or internationally? What are the implications of changing priorities for the education, training and employment of tomorrow’s journalists?

Titles and abstracts for papers (250 words max) are invited by Friday 9th January 2015 and should be submitted online via the email address:

Futurejournalism2015@cardiff.ac.uk

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, UK, and the Official Historian of the BBC. She has written extensively on media history and policy, the interaction between the media and politics, conflicts and security as well as children's broadcasting and the broadcast arts. Her publications include Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation, 1974-1987 (Profile Books, February, 2015), Carnage and the Media (Penguin, 2006) and co-authored with James Curran, the eighth edition of Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (Routledge, 2014). She is on the boards of Full Fact and the Reuters Institute, and is Director of the Orwell Prize, Britain’s premier prize for political writing.

Professor Stephen D. Reese has been a member of the University of Texas at Austin faculty since 1982, where he is the Jesse H. Jones Professor of Journalism. His research focuses on a wide range of issues concerning the sociology of news, the process of media framing, the globalization of journalism, and larger issues of press performance. Recent publications include Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective, co-authored with Pamela Shoemaker (Routledge, 2014), and Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement, co-edited with Wenhong Chen (Routledge, 2015). He has held major roles with the AEJMC and ICA, and lectured at several universities around the world, including as Kurt Baschwitz Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam.

On behalf of the organising committee,
Stuart

Professor Stuart Allan
Deputy Head of School (Academic)
School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies
Bute Building, King Edward VII Avenue
Cardiff University
Cardiff, CF10 3NB
UK

CFP: Call for participants: Digital Placemaking Workshop at ICWSM (Oxford, UK)

Digital Placemaking: Augmenting Physical Places with Contextual Social Data

May 26, 2015  

Oxford, UK

More information available here <http://digitalplacemaking.apps-1and1.com/> or below.

People have embraced social media as a means to express their experiences within and knowledge about particular places, and researchers have continued to analyze these digital traces in order to better understand social activities within particular places. Geo-tagged social media data such as photos, tweets, check-ins, audio, video, and status updates have proliferated and reveal individual and collective senses of place and local insights into interactions between people and place. However, these digital traces alone cannot reveal a holistic sense of place and placemaking.

One of the key goals of the workshop is to create a hands on experience and encourage participants from a variety of backgrounds to discover, share, and interact with experimental techniques of data gathering and urban sensing. The Digital Placemaking Workshop fosters discussions covering topics such as (but not limited to):

• Use of social media to engage communities in placemaking activities and participatory design
• Mobilizing and exhibiting place and placemaking efforts through social media
• Improving understandings of place and space through mining social media
• Pervasive applications for local user interaction and data collection
• Methodological advances in contextual understandings of social media outputs across space & place
• Use of social media to inform design and planning practices
• Role of social media in expressing or altering a sense of place or aiding in the understanding of everyday functionalities of regions, spaces and places
• Enabling citizen, artist, government, and NGO initiatives through social media
• Visualizations and interfaces to enable exploration and sharing of local data and experiences
• Privacy and ethical concerns in citizen engagement

We accept two types of submissions: (1) original research or work-in-progress and (2) project idea around digital placemaking that might be developed as part of this workshop.

Paper submission deadline: March 13, 2015

All contributions must be submitted as PDF files. Submissions will be evaluated by the organizers and Program Committee. The workshop accepts novel research or work-in-progress papers (no longer than 4 pages) or position papers (no longer than 2 pages). All papers must be submitted by the deadlines provided below and formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the author instructions page). All submitted papers 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 through EasyChair:
*https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digitalplacemaking20
<https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digitalplacemaking20> *

*Organizers:*
Germaine Halegoua, University of Kansas
Raz Schwartz, Facebook Research
Ed Manley, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London