[Air-L] Conference on Harmful Online Communication (CHOC2023), 16-17 Nov, Cologne Germany & online

[Weller, Katrin]

Dear all, maybe the following event is of interest to some of you. Best wishes, Katrin.


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CONFERENCE ON HARMFUL ONLINE COMMUNICATION (CHOC2023)
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Location: Cologne, Germany, and online
Conference Dates: 16.-17. November 2023
Deadline for Submission: 30.08.2023 (AoE)
Website: https://www.gesis.org/forschung/tagungen-und-konferenzen/gesis-tagungen/conference-on-harmful-online-communication-choc2023

The event is funded by the Thyssen Foundation.


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ABOUT:
A two-day hybrid conference with sessions focused on different aspects of Harmful Online Communication and talks from leading experts. The main event will take place in Cologne, Germany, with the option of online participation.


ORGANIZED BY:
Katrin Weller, Pascal Siegers, Indira Sen, Christina Dahn (GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne)
Contact: css.events at gesis.org<mailto:css.events at gesis.org>

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OUTLINE:
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Harmful Online Communication refers to a variety of ongoing activities on communication platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and many more. Independent of the platform, harm can, for example, occur in the form of hate speech towards different groups, including racist or sexist content. Harmful online communication can also include aspects of mis- and disinformation, or threats of physical violence. Depending on the type of content, different strategies may be needed to detect it and to apply appropriate counter measures. The aim of this conference is to bring together a group of experts in computer-based detection and analysis of harmful online communication to discuss new developments in the field. The focus will lie on theoretical concept definitions, data quality, and comparative measurement tools. This will benefit the field of harmful online communication studies by building a community around validity and reliability and creating a baseline that can inform the building of comparative research and shared knowledge. The output of the conference will inform the future work in Computational Social Sciences and help more traditional social scientists to improve their use of data from online platforms.

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CONFIRMED INVITED SPEAKERS:
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- Isabelle Augenstein, University of Copenhagen
- Leon Derczynski, ITU Copenhagen & University of Washington
- Iginio Gagliardone, University of the Witwatersrand
- Libby Hemphill, University of Michigan
- Homa Hosseinmardi, University of Pennsylvania
- Tetsuro Kobayashi, Waseda University
- Anne Lauscher, University of Hamburg
- Philip Lorenz-Spreen, Max-Planck-Institute Berlin
- Ilia Markov, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Diana Rieger, Ludwig-Maximilians-University München
- Björn Ros, University of Edinburgh
- Mattia Samory, Sapienza University of Rome
- Francielle Vargas, University of São Paulo

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CALL FOR ABSTRACTS (for ONSITE POSTER SESSION in Cologne)
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CHOC2023 welcomes proposals for an onsite poster session on 16 November 2023 at the Conference on Harmful Online Communication in person in Cologne. This conference seeks to bring together a community of researchers from the (Computational) Social Sciences and related disciplines to discuss data quality, methods, ethics, theoretical work, and practical challenges related to harmful online communication.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
* Quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods research on topics subsumed under harmful online communication including but not limited to abusive language, hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, and online harassment
* Computer-mediated approaches for tackling such types of communication such as content moderation and policy making.
* Computational methods for research on harmful online communication, such as network analysis, textual and image analysis, large language models and machine learning.
* Resource creation for studying harmful online communication such as datasets, codebooks, annotation tasks, and taxonomies
* Theoretical discussions and practical concepts related to countering misinformation and harmful online communication.
* Ethical and legal aspects of Harmful Online Communication research.
* Bias and inequalities of (automated) hate speech detection, datasets, and analysis methods
* Development of communal resources in Harmful Online Communication research
Presentations at the poster session can be of published work, in preparation for publication or work in-progress. Submissions are open to researchers from all career stages, including PhD candidates and Master students. Abstracts of up to 500 words (excluding references) should be submitted via email to css.events at gesis.org<mailto:css.events at gesis.org> until 30 August 2023 (AoE).


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PARTICIPATION:
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PLEASE NOTE:The number of poster presentations is limited, given that it will only take place in person in Cologne. In case of a higher number of high-quality submissions, we may have to limit both the number of accepted posters and the registration to first authors of the posters. Co-authors and other attendees will be admitted if space permits and potentially be wait-listed.
Online participation will be available for everyone interested, but registration will be required to receive the access information.
POSTER PRESENTERS NEED TO PRESENT IN PERSON.
REGISTRATION FEE: Eur 60,- for on-site participation in Cologne / free online participation (poster presenters need to present in-person)

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Dr. Katrin Weller (she/her)
Team Lead "Digital Society Observatory"
Dept. Computational Social Science
GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8
D-50667 Cologne
https://www.gesis.org/en/institute/staff/person/katrin.weller