[Air-L] 2nd Call for Papers - "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle" + plus a great free tool for capturing data

[Stuart Shulman]

Do you need YouTube data for research? Give Tubekit at try!

http://www.tubekit.org/

TubeKit is a toolkit for creating YouTube crawlers. It allows one to
build one's own crawler that can crawl YouTube based on a set of seed
queries and collect up to 17 different attributes. TubeKit assists in
all the phases of this process starting database creation to finally
giving access to the collected data with browsing and searching
interfaces.

Call for Papers

"YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States"
April 3 & 4, 2009 - Amherst, Massachusetts
http://youtube08election.crowdvine.com/

A two-day conference jointly hosted by:
The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science
The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP)
The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)
The National Center for Digital Government (NCDG)

Keynote Speakers
Day 1: Richard Rogers, Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the
University of Amsterdam and Director of govcom.org. Dr. Rogers is a
Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the
Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers
concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been
improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves
studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the
adjudicative or 'recommender' cultures of the Web that help to
determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The
most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the
Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph
visualizer.

Day 2: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. &
William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of
Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the
Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at
Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the
formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social
and knowledge networks in communities.  Specifically, his research
team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science
to map, understand and enable more effective networks in a wide
variety of contexts including communities of practice in business,
science and engineering communities, disaster response teams, public
health networks, digital media and learning networks, and in virtual
worlds, such as Second Life.

Approach
The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary
approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and
communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly endorses new and
experimental approaches involving collaboration with information and
computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not
limited to:

- citizen initiated campaign videos,
- candidates' use of YouTube,
- bloggers use of YouTube to influence the primaries or election,
- the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the
election cycle,
- the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or
voting behavior,
- social network analysis of YouTube and related election-oriented sites,
- political theory or communication theory and YouTube in the context
of the 2008 election,
- new metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect" on elections,
- archives for saving and tools for mapping the full landscape of
YouTube election content,
- use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral
politics, or
- reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube.

Paper Submissions
Authors are invited to prepare and submit to JITP a manuscript
following one of the six submission formats by January 7, 2009. These
formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes,
review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The
goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a
wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008
Election Cycle in the United States."

How to Submit
Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong
JITP paper via the JITP web site is documented at
http://www.jitp.net/. Papers will be put through an expedited blind
peer review process by the Program Committee and authors will be
notified about a decision by February 15, 2009. A small number of
papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Other
paper authors will be invited to present a poster during the Friday
evening reception. All posters must include a "YouTube" version of
their research findings.

Best Paper and Poster Cash Prizes
The author (or authors) of the best research paper will receive a
single $1,000 prize. The creator (or creators) of the best YouTube
poster/research presentation will also receive a single prize of
$1,000.

Conference Co-Chairs
Stuart Shulman, University of Massachusetts Amherst
(mailto:stu at polsci.umass.edu)
Michael Xenos, Louisiana State University (mailto:xenos at lsu.edu)

Program Committee
Sam Abrams, Harvard University
Micah Altman, Harvard University
Karine Barzilai-Nahon, University of Washington
Lance Bennett, University of Washington
Ryan Biava, University of Wisconsin
Bob Boynton, University of Iowa
John Brigham, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Tom Carlson, Åbo Akademi University
Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway University of London
Greg Elmer, Ryerson University
Kirsten Foot, University of Washington
Jane Fountain, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Jeff Guliati, Bentley College
Mike Hais, Co-author, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the
Future of American Politics
Matthew Hale, Seton Hall University
Justin Holmes, University of Minnesota
Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute
Mike Margolis, University of Cincinnati
Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst
John McNutt, University of Delaware
Andrew Philpot, University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute
Antoinette Pole, Montclair State University
Stephen Purpura, Cornell University
Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project
Jeffrey Seifert, Congressional Research Service
Mack Shelley, Iowa State University
Charlie Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Chirag Shah, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
John Wilkerson, University of Washington
Christine Williams, Bentley College
Morley Winograd, University of Southern California
Quan Zhou, University of Wisconsin-Stout

-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
http://people.umass.edu/stu/
stu at polsci.umass.edu

Editor, Journal of Information Technology & Politics
http://www.jitp.net

Director, QDAP-UMass
http://people.umass.edu/stu/QDAP-UMass/

Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government
http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/