a thaumaturgical compendium

I don’t think I can stay in Europe all of September and October without reinforcing the impression some of my colleagues have about my work ethic, which seems to be tied up with how many hours each faculty member spends in his or her office. However, if I could get away, I’d be winding my way to Graz for this workshop:

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a community of researchers interested in discussing the manifold challenges and potentials of knowledge acquisition from the social web.

With the advent of the “Social Web”, a new breed of web applications has enriched the social dimension of the web. On the social web, actors can be understood as social agents – technological or human entities – that collaborate, pursue goals, are autonomous, and are capable of exhibiting flexible problem solving and social behavior. By participating in the social web, both technological and human agents leave complex traces of social interactions and their motivations behind, which can be studied, analyzed and utilized for a range of different purposes. The broad availability and open accessibility of these traces in social web corpora, such as in del.icio.us, Wikipedia, weblogs and others, provides researchers with opportunities for, for example, novel knowledge acquisition techniques and strategies, as well as large scale, empirically coupled “in the field” studies of social processes and structures.

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a diverse community of researchers interested in the social web by seeking submissions that are focusing on understanding and evaluating the role of agents, goals, structures, concepts, context, knowledge and social interactions in a broad range of social web applications. Examples for such applications include, but are not limited to social authoring (e.g. wikis, weblogs), social sharing (e.g. del.icio.us, flickr), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) and social searching (e.g. wikia, eurekster, mahalo) applications.

No, no, not me. Or at least not except during the summers and weekends. But there is a fun-looking one-day conference on May 16th called Going Solo, all about the process of becoming a successful freelancer in a world that seems to be moving us all in that direction. They have some well-known speakers lined up and are looking for some other possibilities.

I would love to head out to Lausanne for the day and spend the rest of the weekend skiing. School’s out by then, but I’m afraid the Falcon 50 is scheduled for its annual, and I really can’t be bothered with commercial carriers these days.

This is a bit late in coming, but I hope you will submitting a paper to present at the Internet Research 9.0 conference, which is being held in Copenhagen this October. It’s a great conference with a fairly unique collection of papers and people. While there are a lot of small conferences that deal with issues related to social computing, few of this size draw in such a diversity of fields and perspectives. More information about the conference can be found at http://conferences.aoir.org and I’ve copied the Call for Papers after the jump. Deadline for submitting abstracts is coming up quickly (February 8).

Audio: IR9.0 (Copenhagen) CFP

The Call for Papers for this year’s Wikimania is up. It will be held August 3-5 in Taipei this year. Probably too long a trip for me, but for any of the readers who may be in Asia that time of year, it’s certainly worth dropping in on. They are looking for presentations of various sorts on the following themes:

• Wikimedia Communities – Interesting projects and particularities within the communities (we explicitly invite you to present your local Wikimedia project’s community!); policy creation within individual projects; conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity; multilingualism, languages and cultures; social studies.

• Free Content – Open access to information; ways to gather and distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and usability; copyright laws and other legal areas that interfere with Wikimedia projects.

• Technical infrastructure – Issues related to MediaWiki development and extensions; Wikimedia hardware layout; new ideas for development (including usable case studies from other wikis or similar projects).

This is very last minute. I announced this on the SL research list and to some folks individually. Trying to assemble some folks to present their ideas on Second Life. Generally, I’m hoping to hook with ICA’s theme this year, which is (in part) about the politics of creation—at least, that’s how I’m interpretting it! However, any work you are doing on Second Life would be of interest.

The International Communication Association meeting is in San Francisco this year, for May 24-28. The deadline for proposals for the conference is Nov 1, but I’m hoping to finalize a proposal this weekend. If you are interested, send me your 150-word abstract now. That’s right, go to your mail client and send me 150 words on your paper. Unless “now” is after Friday, October 27. Then, you are likely too late.

(Last minute? Who? Me?)

Some time last year, a group at UB got together to write a proposal for a new funding track from NSF focussed on creating a center for learning. The CFP was unusual for NSF: it was highly interdisciplinary and considered learning in the broadest sense. So I pulled together some references and some approaches we might take. This was chopped down to “adult learning and public institutions,” which was very safe, and also not particularly interesting to the NSF. I wasn’t on the grant. I guess they thought I was too “out there.” I suspect—meglomaniac that I am—that I was just “out there” enough.

Nolan and Hunsinger are heading up a new journal, Learning Inquiry that—at least if the call for papers is any indication—is open to some of the more liberal definitions of where and how learning happens: “The journal is a forum centered on learning that remains open to varied objects of inquiry, including machine, human, plant and animal learning as well as the processes of learning in business, government, and the professions, both in formal and informal environments.”

I definitely plan to send a manuscript in to the journal here at some point. I suspect a good chunk of my readers might also find the journal to be of interest as a place to read and a place to write.

This should be no surprise to my grad students at UB, since I encourage them to apply each fall. However, if you have something in hand from the symbolic interactionist perspective, please do send it along. They are doing the presentations at NCA this year, and $300 goes a long way toward your flight down to San Antonio.

CALL FOR AWARD APPLICATIONS

Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award

Sponsored by the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research
(http://www.cccsir.org/)

The Carl Couch Center issues an annual call for student-authored papers to be considered for Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award. The Couch Center welcomes both theoretical and empirical papers that (1) apply symbolic interactionist approaches to Internet studies, (2) demonstrate interactive relationships between social interaction and communication technologies as advocated by Couch, and/or (3) develop symbolic interactionist concepts in new directions. Papers will be evaluated based on the quality of (1) mastery of Symbolic Interactionist approaches and concepts and Couch’s theses, (2) originality, (3) organization, (4) presentation, and (5) advancement of knowledge.