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)



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 Pittsburgh (mailto:shulman@...)

Michael Xenos, Louisiana State University (mailto:xenos@...)



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

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





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