[Air-L] CFP: Studying Social Media and Digital Infrastructures: a workshop-within-a-conference

[Tarleton L. Gillespie]

CFP: Studying Social Media and Digital Infrastructures: a workshop-within-a-conference
          part of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-50)

paper submission deadline: June 15, 2016, 11:59pm HST.


For fifty years, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) has been a home for researchers in the information, computer, and system sciences (http://www.hicss.org/). The 50th anniversary event will be held January 4-7, 2017, at the Hilton Waikoloa Village. With an eye to the exponential growth of digitalization and information networks in all aspects of human activity, HICSS has continued to expand its track on Digital and Social Media (http://www.hicss.org/#!track3/c1xcj).

This year, among the Digital and Social Media track’s numerous offerings, we offer two minitracks meant to work in concert. Designed to sequence together into a single day-long conference-within-a-conference, they will host the best emerging scholarship from sociology, anthropology, communication, information studies, and science & technology studies that addresses the most pressing concerns around digital and social media. In addition, we have developed a pre-conference workshop on digital research methods that will inform and complement the work presented in these minitracks.

Minitrack 1: Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media
http://www.hicss.org/#!critical-ethical-studies-of-dsm/c24u6
Organizers: Tarleton Gillespie, Mary Gray, and Robert Mason

The minitrack will critically interrogate the role of DSM in supporting existing power structures or realigning power for underrepresented or social marginalized groups, and raise awareness or illustrate the ethical issues associated with doing research on DSM. Conceptual papers would address foundational theories of critical studies of media or ethical conduct in periods of rapid sociotechnical change—e.g., new ways of thinking about information exchange in communities and societies. Empirical papers would draw on studies of social media data that illustrate the critical or ethical dimensions of the use of such data. We welcome papers considering topics such as (but not limited to):

    *   the power and responsibility of digital platforms
    *   bias and discrimination in the collection and use of social data
    *   political economies and labor conditions of paid and unpaid information work
    *   values embedded in search engines and social media algorithms
    *   changes in societal institutions driven by social media and data-intensive techniques
    *   alternative forms of digital and social media
    *   the ethical dynamics of studying human subjects through their online data
    *   challenges in studying the flow of information and misinformation
    *   barriers to and professional obligations around accessing and studying proprietary DSM data

Minitrack 2: Values, Power, and Politics in Digital Infrastructures
http://www.hicss.org/#!values-power-and-politics-in-digital-i/c19uj
Organizers: Katie Shilton, Jaime Snyder, and Matthew Bietz

This minitrack will explore the themes of values, power, and politics in relation to the infrastructures that support digital data, documents, and interactions. By considering how infrastructures – the underlying material properties, policy decisions, and mechanisms of interoperability that support digital platforms – are designed, maintained, and dismantled, the work presented in this mini-track will contribute to debates about sociotechnical aspects of digital and social media, with a focus on data, knowledge production, and information access. This session will focus on research that employs techniques such as infrastructural inversion, trace ethnography or design research (among other methods) to explore factors that influence the development of infrastructures and their use in practice. We welcome papers considering topics such as (but not limited to):

    *  politics and ethics in digital platforms and infrastructures
    *  values of stakeholders in digital infrastructures
    *  materiality of values, power, or politics in digital infrastructures
    *  tensions between commercial infrastructures and the needs of communities of practice
    *  maintenance, repair, deletion, decay of digital and social media infrastructures
    *  resistance, adoption and adaptation of digital infrastructures
    *  alternative perspectives on what comprises infrastructures

Pre-conference workshop: Digital Methods “Best Practices”
http://shawnw.io/workshops/HICSS-digitalmethods
Organizers: Shawn Walker, Mary Gray, and Robert Mason

While the study of digital and social media and its impact on society has exploded, discussion of the best methods for doing so remains thin. Academic researchers and practitioners have deployed traditional techniques, from ethnography to social network analysis; but digital and social media challenge and even defy these techniques in a number of ways that must be examined. At the same time, digital and social media may benefit from more organic and unorthodox methods that get at aspects that cannot be examined otherwise. This intensive half day workshop will focus on approaches and best practices for studying digital and social media. We aim to go beyond the application of existing methods into online environments and collect innovative methods that break new ground while producing rigorous insights. This workshop will draw on invited and other participants’ research, teaching, classroom, and business experiences to think through “mixed methods” for qualitative and quantitative studies of digital and social media systems.

Through a series of roundtables and guided discussions, the workshop will focus on best practices for studying digital and social media. As part of these discussions, we also will highlight technical and ethical challenges that arise from our studying cross-platform, digital and social media phenomenon. The output of this workshop will be an open, “co-authored” syllabus for a seminar offering what we might call a mixed-method, “from causal to complicated” approach to digital and social media research, applicable to both researchers and practitioners alike.


How to apply
April 1, 2016: Paper submission opens.
June 15, 2016: Paper submission ends, 11:59pm HST.

Submission to one of the the mini-tracks requires a complete paper. Instructions for submission requirements are available here: http://www.hicss.org/#!author-instructions/c1dsb

Though the two minitracks are designed to work together, for submitting a paper you must choose one to apply to. Feel free to contact the mini-track organizers if you have questions about which is a better fit for your work. For the pre-conference workshop, application instructions, updates, materials, and a group syllabus will be posted on the workshop website.


—
Tarleton Gillespie
tarleton at microsoft.com<mailto:tarleton at microsoft.com>
Microsoft Research, New England
Cornell University