CFP - Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and Ideologies

International Conference

Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and Ideologies

Thursday 03 to Sunday 06 September 2009
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

Interactive announcement (with links): http://www.com.washington.edu/lim/

**Keynote speakers**

. Naomi Baron, American University, USA
. Sally Johnson, University of Leeds, England . Jannis Androutsopoulos, Kings College London, England . Theo van Leeuwen, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

**Background**
This is the third in a series of conferences organized around the role of the media in relation to the representation, construction and/or production of language. The first two conferences were held at Leeds University,
England: in
2005, "Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies" and, in 2007, "Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Policies". In 2009, the conference will be leaving Leeds and coming to Seattle.

**Conference theme**
We invite you to submit abstracts for papers which explore the representation, construction and/or production of language through the technologies and ideologies of new media - the digital discourse of blogs, wikis, texting, instant messaging, internet art, video games, virtual worlds, websites, emails, podcasting, hypertext fiction, graphical user interfaces, and so on.
Of equal interest are the ways that new media language is metalinguistically represented, constructed and/or produced in print and broadcast media such as newspapers and television..

With this new media theme in mind, the 2009 conference will continue to prioritize papers which address the scope of the AILA Research Network on "Language in the Media" by examining the following types of contexts/issues:

. standard languages and language standards; . literacy policy and literacy practices; . language acquisition; . multilingualism and cross-/inter-cultural communication; . language and communication in professional contexts; . language & class, dis/ability, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality and age; . media representations of speech, thought and writing; . language and education; . political discourse; . language, commerce and global capitalism.

**Abstract submission**
Please submit abstracts for papers (20 minutes plus 10 for discussion) by email to [email protected] no later than Thursday 26 February 2009.
Abstracts should include a title, your contact details (name, mailing address, email) and a description of your paper (250 -350 words). The conference committee will begin reviewing abstract submissions immediately after the deadline; notification of acceptance will be Thursday 19 March.
(Please send your abstract as a Word document or in the body of your email.)

**Program and registration**
In order to help your early planning for the conference, we have already finalized the basic program structure for the conference a copy of which can be downloaded from the conference webpage (see above). This outline shows the start and finish times of the conference, the main social events (reception, BBQ and conference dinner), as well as lunches and coffee breaks. The conference planning committee is also arranging an optional program of tours and activities for Sunday 06 September. A business meeting for the AILA Network will also be scheduled for the Sunday morning.

Official conference registration will begin on Thursday 19 March, with early registration ending Thursday 21 May. The final deadline for presenter registration will be Thursday 23 July in order to be included in the final program. Registrations after 23 July will be charged an additional late registration fee of $25.00.

**Conference registration**
The Language in the (New) Media conference is planned as a not-for profit event. Your registration fee will cover the main operating expenses as well as scheduled buffet-style lunches, coffee breaks, the conference dinner, a reception on the first night and a BBQ on the second night. Wine and soft drinks are also included for the evening gatherings.

Early registration - until 21 May $350
Early registration (full-time students) $300
Registration - until 23 July $380
Registration (full-time students) $330
Day rate registration (accepted until 20 August) $150

**Accommodation**
In addition to a number of good local hotels near to campus, the University of Washington offers pleasant, affordable accommodation.

Double room (3 nights, 3-6 Sep, with breakfast) $156 p/p Single room (3 nights, 3-6 Sep, with breakfast) $222 p/p Additional night (e.g. 02 or 06 Sep, double room) $46 p/p Additional night (e.g. 02 or 06 Sep, single room) $68 p/p

The conference organizers can also make recommendations for hotels in and around the University District. More information will be available in due course.

**Publication**
Conference co-organizer Crispin Thurlow is planning to edit a volume provisionally titled "Language in the New Media: Technologies and Ideologies" and is in discussion with the editors of the Oxford University Press' series Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. His goal would be to publish this volume in 2011. To this end, Crispin would like to receive good quality, previously unpublished chapters which may or may not be based on papers presented at the conference. Contributions should be of no more than 7,000 words in length and should conform to APA format, please. More information about the scope of this volume will be made available nearer to the conference; in the meantime, the anticipated deadline for submission of chapters for review will be 31 January 2010.

**Organizers**
The conference is co-hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle, USA and the University of Leeds, England, UK. Organizers are Crispin Thurlow, Kristine Mroczek and Jamie Moshin, Department of Communication, University of Washington, Box 353740, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. Please direct any queries to the organizers at [email protected]

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CFP - International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2009)

The Fifth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2009) has extended its deadline and is taking submissions online until 15 January 2009. The theme of the 2009 Congress is "Advancing Human Rights Through Qualitative Research."

Please visit the link below for more information or to submit a paper and/or
panel: www.icqi.org

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CFP - Social Aspects of the Web (SAW 2009)

3rd Workshop on Social Aspects of the Web (SAW 2009)
in conjunction with 12th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2009)

Poznan, Poland
April 27, 28 or 29, 2009

http://bis.kie.ae.poznan.pl/12th_bis/wscfp.php?i=33&ws=saw2009

============

Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2009

============
In recent years, the Web has moved from a simple one-way communication channel, extending traditional media, to a complex "peer-to-peer" communication space with a blurred author/audience distinction and new ways to create, share, and use knowledge in a social way.

This change of paradigm is currently profoundly transforming most areas of our life: our interactions with other people, our relationships, ways of gathering information, ways of developing social norms, opinions, attitudes and even legal aspects, as well as ways of working and doing business.

The change also raises a strong need for theoretical, empirical and applied studies related to how people may interact on the Web, how they actually do so, and what new possibilities and challenges are emerging in the social, business and technology dimensions.

Following the two previous events, the goal of the 3rd Workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners together to explore the issues and challenges related to social aspects of the Web.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

* People on the social Web
* Individuals on the Web (identity, privacy, incentives, activity models, trust and reputation, ...)
* Communities on the Web (roles, leadership, social norms and conflicts, types of communities, ...)
* Collaboration on the Web (content and data development and maintenance, decision taking ...)
* On-line and off-line life (mixed interaction models, on-line vs. off-line communities, ... )
* Business activities in the social Web (sales, exchanges, word-of-mouth, recruiting, marketing, ...)
* Data and content on the social Web
* Social content organization (tagging, classification, recommendations, collaborative filtering, ...)
* Content dynamics (content flow and evolution, mashups, comments, collaborative creation, ...)
* Semantic social Web (standards, annotation of social content/data, ontology learning, ...)
* Data and social network portability (standards, policies, technologies, licenses, ...)
* Social software and services
* Specific types of social software (social networks, blogs, wikis, resources sharing, ...)
* Development (architectures, technologies, platforms, infrastructures, ...)
* Adoption (critical mass problem, socio-technical gap, data and social network migration, ...)
* Alternative user interaction models (games, mobile, mixed reality, ...)
* Social software in the enterprise (knowledge management, CRM, collaborative software, ...)
* Business models of social services (pricing, cost models, customer relation, content acquisition, ...)
* Mining the social Web
* Mining user-generated content (opinion, comments, rankings, forums, ...)
* Mining the social graph (collaborative filtering, social network analysis, ...)
* Mining activity patterns (access, used features, participation, interactions, ...)
* Entity-centric content integration (on people, experts, objects, companies, locations, ...)
* Social Web mining in business (for marketing, products design, customer support, ...)

SUBMISSION

* Long papers: max. 12 pages
* Work-in-progress reports: max. 6 pages
* Demo papers: max. 4 pages

Papers must be submitted in PDF format according to Springer LNBIP template available from http://www.springer.com/east/home/computer/lncs?SGWID=5-164-7-487211-0.

Submission system is available at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=saw2009.

Papers approved for presentation at SAW 2009 will be published in BIS 2009 workshop proceedings, as a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

All authors of accepted papers as well as other participants will be asked to read accepted papers abstracts before the workshop (papers will be available on-line in advance) to facilitate discussion. Workshop participants will be also invited to take part in the BIS conference and other BIS workshops.

IMPORTANT DATES

* February 1, 2009 - submission deadline for papers
* February 22, 2009 - notification of acceptance/rejection
* March 15, 2009 - submission of final papers
* April 27, 28 or 29, 2009 - the workshop

ORGANIZERS

* Poznan University of Economics, Department of Information Systems (http://kie.ae.poznan.pl/)

CHAIRS

* Dominik Flejter
* Tomasz Kaczmarek
* Marek Kowalkiewicz

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Krisztian Balog, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
* Simone Braun, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany
* John Breslin, DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland
* Tanguy Coenen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
* Sebastian Dietzold, University of Leipzig, Germany
* Davide Eynard, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
* Dominik Flejter, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
* Adam Jatowt, Kyoto University, Japan
* Tomasz Kaczmarek, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
* Marek Kowalkiewicz, SAP Research Brisbane, Australia
* Marcin Paprzycki, Polish Academy of Science, Poland
* Katharina Siorpaes, STI, University of Innsbruck, Austria
* Jie Tang, Tshingua University, China
* Celine van Damme, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
* Valentin Zacharias, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany

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CFP - Dating & Philosophy

Dating & Philosophy

Kristie Miller
Department of Philosophy
University of Sydney

Marlene Clark
Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
The City College of New York

We seek titles and abstracts for a new volume in the Wiley-Blackwell series Philosophy for Everyone, under the general editorship of Fritz Allhoff. As with previous titles now subsumed under the series—Wine & Philosophy, Beer & Philosophy, Food & Philosophy, and Running & Philosophy—Dating & Philosophy will integrate the insights of philosophers and interdisciplinary academics such as sociologists, psychologists, computer scientists and biologists in order to explore the philosophical, societal, psychological, digital, and biological implications of dating. The abstracts and resulting selected papers should be written for an educated, but non-specialized, audience.

Dating is a fraught endeavor that we all have engaged in at some point, and something that some of us are rather better at than others.

Countless philosophical questions are raised by the perfectly general question, “How should we date?” Suggestions include, but are not limited to, papers that consider the ethical aspects of dating, and papers that consider the prudential aspects of dating. Papers that consider both are especially welcome.

The Ethical Aspects of Dating

Truth telling in dating: To what extent and under what circumstances should we tell a date the truth about ourselves? Is it permissible to date multiple people simultaneously, and if so, under what circumstances and for how long?

Sex and dating: Does the third date rule really apply?

Age and dating: At what age is it permissible to start dating? How great an age difference can there be between people who are dating? Do substantial age differences in dating couples point to ethical considerations? If so, what are they? If not, why not?

Dating and not dating: When is it “a date” and when is it not? Does it matter? How long should a couple date before either moving forward or splitting up? At what point, and under what circumstances is someone being strung along?

Dating and friends: Is it possible to transform a friendship into dating, or does each require totally different skill sets? Is it permissible to date your best friend’s ex?

Dating, family and society: When dating, does family approval matter?

Essays considering the complexities of interracial dating, cross-cultural dating and socially disavowed dating are welcome.

Internet dating: Does a “virtual” first meeting change the ethics of subsequent dates? Are the “truth” issues related to Internet dating the same as those stemming from face-to-face encounters? Also of interest are essays describing a purely virtual dating relationship, one in which the daters never actually meet.

No longer dating: How is it best to end a dating relationship? Does an email or text message suffice? What are the ethical or psychological ramifications of dumping or being dumped?

The Prudential Aspects of Dating

Dating and evolution: Do the hormonal changes that occur early in dating lead to rational or irrational choices in partner selection? What role do pheromones play in partner selection, if any? What are the biological implications of daters “selecting”—or ruling out--potential partners due to height, weight, hair color, eye color, etc.? Is someone who can pay for dinner going to be a better provider than someone who cannot? What sorts of unconscious processes lead us to choose this person rather than that?

Effective dating: Is it possible to maximize one’s chances of good mate selection? Is it possible to learn how to maximize one’s chances of good mate selection thanks to the lessons of poor mate selection? In other words, so we learn from our “mistakes”? Does repetition compulsion influence dating life? Can decision theory and game theory teach us whom to date? Are the chances for dating success enhanced by choosing dates “in our league”—in terms of looks, money, status, profession, age, and so on? What’s “marketable” in dating and what is it worth? How many people should we date before choosing a permanent partner?

Ethical and Prudential Aspects of Dating

Flirtation: Is flirting necessarily an intentional act or just fun in itself?

Parents’ dates: Are your parents dating too? Do we relate to our parents’ dates differently than our own? Do we judge them by a different set of standards? At what point is it appropriate for a parent to introduce a “date” into the family dynamic?

The emphasis is on making contributions entertaining as well as scholarly, and given the topic at hand we welcome proposals that are provocative, humorous, or even a bit cheeky. We are looking for original and quirky proposals, so be imaginative. Please attend to the following guidelines:

• Abstract of paper (approximately 250 words) due by December 15, 2008

• Accepted authors will receive notification by January 15, 2008

• The submission deadline for accepted papers will be Summer 2009

• Final papers must be between 4000-5000 words and be aimed at a general, educated audience.

• Abstracts should be submitted electronically to
[email protected] [email protected]> or [email protected] [email protected]>

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CFP - The Work of Life-Writing

The Work of Life-Writing
26-28 May 2009

This major conference is being hosted by the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, in collaboration with the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina.

Plenary speakers will include:
Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Paul John Eakin, Ira. B. Nadel, Hermione Lee, Philippe Lejeune, Trudier Harris, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Kathryn Hughes.

The conference will aim to assess the current state of the field of Life-Writing, from an inter-disciplinary and international perspective, identifying its major recent developments in theory as well as practice, and including some of the more creative experiments (in fields such as poetry, as well as visual and electronic media).

The idea of ‘The Work of Life-Writing’ is that it could be taken to cover the following (often interrelated) areas:

1. The pragmatics of life-writing: what political, social, intellectual, or emotional benefits ensuing from writing lives.

2. The work contributed by life-writing to other disciplines, such as history (cultural memory, feminism, social history, etc); medicine (case histories); law (testimony, character references etc); philosophy (examples and hypotheticals) etc.

3. The psycho-analytic effects of writing auto/biography etc. What life writing does for its authors; its readers; its societies (which shades off into more sociological/anthropological/historical approaches).

4. The therapeutic work effected by life-writing. This would encompass illness narratives, abuse narratives, but also reflective narratives of all kinds. (This may be hard to distinguish from the previous category, but perhaps deals with effects that are more conscious.)

5. The cultural function of life-writing – whether considered in sociological, anthropological, or cultural-critical terms.

6. Reflective work on the practice of writing, or writing about, auto/biography and other life-writing forms.

7. Life-writing, performance, and performativity, including visual media.

8. Auto/biography as a literary work, and the contribution it makes to a writer’s ‘work’ or ‘works’.

9. The work ethic of Life-writing. The idea here would be to consider ways in which conventional emphases on a subject’s public acts or literary works may shape or even falsify the sense of a life, downplaying other, non-work, experiences. Also to consider the role of ‘play’ in life-writing, understood both in terms of scandalous refusals (such as Lytton Strachey’s) to take biographical subjects seriously; and also in the Derridean sense of play in the system, which problematises the life-writer’s work.

10. The work life-writing does in the literary field. To explore the ways in which biography, autobiography, letters etc are implicated in the definitions of canons, genres, and modes of interpretation.

The conference will be structured with up to 36 parallel paper sessions in addition to the keynote and plenary lectures. Sessions are envisaged to include the following topics:
The State of the Field
Life-Writing and Medical Humanities
Diaries and Journals and Letters
Auto/Biography and Psychoanalysis
Interdisciplinary Life-Writing
The Pragmatics of Life-Writing
Life- and Death-Writing
Life-Writing and the Senses
Class Consciousness and Auto/biography
Portraiture
Memory Maps
Life-Writing and Memory Cultures

Offers of papers, with a 200-500 word abstract, should be sent to Max Saunders by 15 December 2008. [email protected] Selected papers from the conference will be published, either in a special journal issue or a volume of essays.

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CFP - Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media

The Race & Ethnic Studies Institute at Texas A&M University (http://resi.tamu.edu/ .edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://resi.tamu.edu/> ) convenes a symposium every other year, and the proposed theme for the 2008-2009 year is Shifting Terrains: Inequalities in the 21st Century, and the symposium itself is to focus on Race, Ethnicity, and (New) Media.

The explosion of work on New Media (including the Internet, mobile devices, Web 2.0) and the juxtaposition and overlap between 'old' media (radio, television, film, and mass-print media) and New Media is a rich field of cultural production and scholarly research in which scholars of race and ethnicity have not been particularly well-represented.

However, there are cutting edge scholars who do indeed explore various aspects of race/ethnicity and (New) Media (including audience/fan studies, representations of racial and ethnic identities in a variety of media, identity-focused online communities, etc.).

We invite such scholars to submit papers with the intention of presenting work that deals with these topics during a 2 1/2 day interdisciplinary symposium, with several keynote speakers, including Dr. Lisa Nakamura and Dr. Henry Bial. We intend that a number of these papers will be compiled into an edited volume intended for publication, and that all papers and participants will have the opportunity to upload their papers on our developing interactive website for scholarly exchange on working papers.

Submissions: 500 word abstracts or full papers of no more than 8000 words (including notes and references) should be submitted to:
[email protected] and [email protected] by December 31, 2008. Submissions will be reviewed by an organizing committee, and authors will be notified of acceptance/rejection by March 15, 2009.

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CFP - AoIR 2009

Internet Research 10.0 - Internet: Critical

The 10th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)

October 7-11, 2009
Hilton Milwaukee City Center
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

As the Internet has become an increasingly ubiquitous and mundane medium, the analytical shortcomings of the division between the online and the offline have become evident. Shifting the focus to the fundamental intermeshing of online and offline spaces, networks, economies, politics, locations, agencies, and ethics, Internet: Critical invites scholars to consider material frameworks, infrastructures, and exchanges as enabling constraints in terms of online phenomena.

Furthermore, the conference invites considerations of Internet research as a critical practice and theory, its intellectual histories, investments, and social reverberations. How do we, as Internet researchers, connect our work to social concerns or cultural developments both local and global, and what kinds of agency may we exercise in the process? What kinds of redefinitions of the political (in terms of networks, micropolitics, participation, lifestyles, resistant or critical practices) are necessary when conceptualizing Internet cultures within the current geopolitical and geotechnological climate?

To this end, we call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and academic communities that address the conference themes, including papers that intersect and/or interconnect the following:

• critical moments, elements, practices
• critical theories, methods, constructs
• critical voices, histories, texts
• critical networks, junctures, spaces
• critical technologies, artifacts, failures
• critical ethics, interventions, alternatives.

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

SUBMISSIONS

We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference PAPERS and we also welcome proposals for ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized PANEL PROPOSALS that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme.

DEADLINES

Call for Papers Released: 15 November 2008 Submissions Due: 1 February 2009
Notification: 15 March 2009

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

All papers and presentations in this session will be evaluated in a standard blind peer review.

Format

- PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 600-800 words

-FULL PAPERS (OPTIONAL): For submitters requiring peer review of full papers, manuscripts of up to 8,000 words will be accepted for review.

These will be reviewed and judged separately from abstract submissions

- PANEL PROPOSALS - submit a 600-800 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation

- ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting. An individual may also submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them.

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS

Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society, edited by Caroline Haythornwaite and Lori Kendall. Authors selected for submission for this issue have already been contacted prior to the conference.

All papers submitted to the conference system will be available to AoIR members after the conference.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

On October 7, 2009, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquiries regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to both the Conference Chair and Program Chair and no later than March 31, 2009.

List of Conference Workshops

CONTACT INFORMATION

Program Chair: Susanna Paasonen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Conference Co-Chairs and Coordinators: Elizabeth Buchanan, Michael
Zimmer, UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies and Center for
Information Policy Research; Steve Jones, University of Illinois-Chicago
Vice-President of AoIR: Mia Consalvo, Ohio University
Association Website: http://www.aoir.org

Conference Website

SPONSORS (partial list)**

• School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Department of Communication Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago
• Center for Information and Society and the Department of Communication, University of Washington
• American Society for Information Science and Technology—Wisconsin Chapter

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CFP - International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

The Fifth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2009) is now taking submissions online. The theme of the 2009 Congress is "Advancing Human Rights Through Qualitative Research."

The 2009 Congress will offer scholars the opportunity to form coalitions and engage in debate and dialogue on on how qualitative research can be used to bridge gaps in cultural and linguistic understandings. Delegates will address such topics as academic freedom, researcher safety, indigenous human rights, human rights violations, ethical codes, torture, political violence, social justice, racial, ethnic and gender and environmental disparities in education, welfare and healthcare, truth and reconciliation commissions, justice as healing. Delegates will consider the meaning of ethics, evidence, advocacy and social justice under a humane human rights agenda.

Sessions will take up such topics as: the politics of evidence; alternatives to evidence-based models; mixed-methods; public policy discourse; social justice; human subject research; indigenous research ethics; decolonizing inquiry; standpoint epistemologies. Contributors are invited to experiment with new methodologies, and new presentational formats (drama, performance, poetry, autoethnography, fiction). Such work will offer guidelines and exemplars showing how qualitative research can be used in the human rights and policy-making arenas.

To submit a paper or poster abstract or a panel, please visit the website

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CFP - Mediated Girlhood

Mediated Girlhood: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture edited by Mary Celeste Kearney, PhD, The University of Texas at Austin

Proposal deadline: October 15, 2008

This collection--currently proposed as part of Peter Lang's "Mediated Youth" series, edited by Sharon Mazzarella--will include new work on girls' media culture that broadens and enriches the field.

Of particular interest are chapters that expand scholarship on girls' media and popular culture beyond its conventional white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western, consumerist, and presentist framework.

Possible topics:

- girls' media production
- girls' media made prior to the 1990s
- non-white girlhood in media and popular culture
- non-Western girlhood in media and popular culture
- queer girlhood in media and popular culture
- working-class girlhood in media and popular culture
- girlhood in documentary film
- girlhood in reality TV shows
- girls' media reception/fan practices
- girls and video gaming
- girls and cyberculture
- girlhood and music culture
- girls and mobile technologies
- girls and conglomerated media culture.

Please send a 250-word proposal, short bibliography, brief author's bio, and contact information to Mary Celeste Kearney at [email protected]>[email protected] by October 15, 2008.

Notification of accepted proposals will be made by December 1, 2008.
First chapter drafts of 5000 to 8000 words will be due in late spring 2009.

For further information, please contact Mary Celeste Kearney at [email protected]

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CFP - Emerging Ethical Issues of Life in Virtual Worlds

Emerging Ethical Issues of Life in Virtual Worlds
Call for chapters

Scholarly articles on emerging issues of life in virtual worlds such as Second Life are solicited. Work that connects streams of ethics research and theory to virtual worlds as they are and to what they are developing into is particularly sought. Among the virtual world issues explicitly invited are: privacy, monitoring and eavesdropping, the fear of being exploited, the loss of identity, ethical impacts of aesthetic decisions, values and ethics manifested in the social processes and their relevance for activities such as design there, professional ethics, standards of integrity given identity issues and practices, malevolence and altruism, legal and ethical doctrines of confidential and privileged information, ethics for students and instructors, ethical development stages and issues, vandalism, harassment and crime, how ethics and values are inscribed in the discourse and practices of social groups, and how they can change and emerge in the midst of pragmatic concerns, such as collective tasks.

Proposals of any length are welcome, though the more detailed and clear the easier it will be for us to have it properly reviewed. Also, include your full contact information, institution affiliation and position. Please include information on your related publications and other work.

Schedule.
Proposals due August 15, 2008.
Notification of acceptance/rejection decision after review process, September 1, 2008.
First drafts of chapters due, January 15, 2009.
Revised final drafts due, March 15, 2009.
Publication, June 15, 2009 (Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC).

Editors: Charles Wankel, St. John's University, New York, and Shaun Malleck,
University of California, Irvine. Send all correspondence to [email protected]
and [email protected] . Include in the subject field VW ETHICS.

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CFP - Visible Memories Conference

Visible Memories Conference
Syracuse University
Oct. 2-4, 2008

Call for Papers

Conference Theme: The Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University invites papers for competitive selection. The conference will explore the intersections between visual culture and memory studies with particular focus on the ways in which memories are manifested and experienced in visible, material, or spatial form.

Examples of especially relevant and desirable research topics include: local sites of memory; memorials and archives; environmentalism and representations of nature; regional, national, or global tourism; photography or cinema; digital media; and art installations. We also welcome other research topics in similarly innovative areas.
The Visible Memories Conference is presented by the Visual Arts and Cultures Cluster of The Central New York Humanities Corridor, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Corridor is a large-scale partnership with Syracuse University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester that connects scholarship in five other cluster areas: philosophy, linguistics, religions and cultures, musicology/music history, and humanities at the interface of science/technology.

Conference Format: The conference will feature an innovative combination of events designed to facilitate conversation not only between a variety of researchers concerned with the study of visual culture and memory but also between academics and distinguished professionals in art and design, film production, and institutional archiving.

Featured events will include:

· A keynote lecture by conceptual artist Ernesto Pujol.

· Plenary speakers:

Cara Finnegan (Speech Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Andrea Hammer (Landscape Architecture, Cornell University)
George Legrady (Media Arts and Technology and Art, University of California at Santa Barbara)
Julia Meltzer (media artist)
Phaedra Pezzullo (Communication and Culture, Indiana University)
Gregory Sholette (Art and Art History, Queens College)
David Thorne (media artist)
Patricia Zimmermann (Cinema and Photography, Ithaca College).

· Competitive panel sessions.

· Research workshops and roundtables.

· A gallery reception and film/video screenings.

Submission Guidelines: Submit a paper abstract electronically (500 word maximum). Include a separate cover page with paper title; author name and affiliation; and contact information. Submissions should be addressed to Dr. Anne T. Demo (atdemo_at_syr.edu).

Abstracts will be reviewed by the conference planning committee. Deadline for abstract submission is May 1, 2008. Acceptance notification will be sent by June 1, 2008.

Conference History: Syracuse University has been heavily involved in the study of public memory and visual culture for the past seven years. The university has previously hosted two major interdisciplinary conferences devoted to the themes of “Framing Public Memory” (2001) and “Contesting Public Memories” (2005). These events have attracted national and international scholars from such disciplines as Anthropology, Rhetorical Studies, Philosophy, Writing, Geography, and Art. As a result of these efforts, the Syracuse University “Public Memory Project” has become a hub for collaboration among scholars from over a dozen departments and has hosted numerous individual scholars while supporting specific memory-related projects within the Syracuse community.

Travel and Accommodations: Syracuse University is located in the heart of Central New York, close to many major metropolitan areas (2.5 hours from Buffalo; 4 from Philadelphia; 4.1 from New York City; 5 from Boston; 5.4
from Pittsburgh). Conference participants may travel conveniently to Syracuse, NY, through Syracuse Hancock International Airport.

The conference will be held at the Renaissance Syracuse Hotel (315-479-7000). Other high-quality accommodations nearby include the Sheraton Syracuse (315-475-3000) and the Genesee Grande Hotel (315-476-4212).

See our conference website for further details.

Additional questions about the Visible Memories Conference may be addressed to:

Dr. Anne T. Demo
Phone: 315-443-1032
E-mail: atdemo_at_syr.edu

Communication and Rhetorical Studies
100 Sims Hall, Building V
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York 13244

Posted by prolurkr at 05:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - mSOCIETY 2008/EURO mGOV 2008

MOBILE LIFE EVENTS
--- exploring the influence of mobile technologies on life ---

-- mSOCIETY 2008 -- The 1st International Conference on Mobile Society
-- EURO mGOV 2008 -- The 3rd European Conference on Mobile Government

15 -19 September 2008, Sheraton Voyager, Antalya, Turkey
www.mgovernment.org/events/ [email protected]
-----------------
Mobile technologies are having a great impact on how we live our lives. These influences range from personal relations to interaction in society, and from the transformation of the public sector to the dynamics of economic development.

mLife conference and exhibitions are prime events for all organizations and professionals who would like to monitor, take part in and shape the development of the social aspects of the mobile revolution. They provide opportunities to businesses, public sector organizations and researchers to explore the frontiers of the social mobile revolution and be informed in order to reach their goals.

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EURO mGOV 2008 - The 3rd European Conference on Mobile Government
15-16 September 2008, Sheraton Voyager, Antalya, Turkey
-----

Mobile Government involves revolutionary approaches to the modernization of public sector via the utilization of networked mobile technologies in local or central government organizations. It aims to enhance public sector business by creating new opportunities to provide services to society. mGovernment is now a recognized field of
practice and research, and constitutes the next evolutionary step of progress in eGovernment.

The EURO mGOV 2008 aims to be a platform for presenting, exchanging and disseminating the newest developments, ideas, applications and services in the field of mGovernment among three essential constituents: public and private sector professionals and the researchers.

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mSOCIETY 2008 The 1st International Conference on Mobile Society
18-19 September 2008, Sheraton Voyager, Antalya, Turkey
-----

Mobile Society refers to the emerging trends of the collective-life on earth driven by the technology of networked mobile phones and other mobile devices. These technologies and its fast and wide adoption is influencing the way we live in the society, we run businesses and the way we are as an individual.

The First International Conference on Mobile Society (mSociety 2008) aims to be a platform for the presentation, exchange and dissemination of the latest developments, ideas, applications and services involving all aspects of practice and research in mSociety.
----------------------------------------

The mLife events organization invites you to join the networks and forums for creating, exchanging and disseminating business, social and psychological perspectives on mobile technologies and how they influence our life on earth.

Further Information on participation and content please visit www.mgovernment.org/events/ or email us [email protected]

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CFP - THE GOOD LIFE IN A TECHNOLOGICAL AGE

THE GOOD LIFE IN A TECHNOLOGICAL AGE
Multidisciplinary Workshop at the University of Twente, The Netherlands June 12-14, 2008

Organized by Philip Brey (chair), Adam Briggle, Ed Spence, Johnny Soraker Department of Philosophy, University of Twente and 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology, the Netherlands.

Maximum number of participants: 32

This workshop will consider the implications of contemporary technology for the quality of life, and will examine approaches from philosophy and social and behavioural science for studying the quality of life in a technological age. Since the industrial revolution, modern technology has seriously impacted day-to-day life and has engendered changing ideals of the good life. In recent years, new technologies in the information, medical, industrial, and other sectors have further impacted everyday life. In this workshop, different disciplinary perspectives, from philosophy, psychology, economics and other fields, will be employed to interpret and evaluate contemporary relations between technology and the quality of life.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
Philip Brey, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Netherlands
Luigino Bruni, Department of Economics, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy
Charles Ess, Interdisciplinary studies, Drury University, USA
Jeroen van den Hoven, Department of Philosophy, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Anton Tupa, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida, USA
Ruut Veenhoven, Department of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Peter-Paul Verbeek, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Netherlands

More invited speakers will be announced on http://ceptes.nl/glita

TOPICS INCLUDE:

? Philosophical and empirical methods for studying the good life and quality of life in a technological culture
? Implications of modern technology for the quality of life
? Hedonist, desire-satisfactionist and objective list accounts of contemporary life
? Quality of life, consumer culture and consumer technologies
? Quality of life, political philosophies and technology policy
? Quality of life, sustainability and the environment
? Quality of life and information technology
? Quality of life and biomedical technology
? New technologies and changing ideals of the good life
? Welfare economics and technology
? Happiness studies and technology

We are looking for contributions that employ conceptions of the quality of life or well-being that go beyond traditional social-economical quality-of-life indices, and that consider either the subjective preferences and psychological states of persons (as in psychology and welfare economics) or particular normative ideals of the good life (as developed in philosophy).

SUBMISSION OF EXTENDED ABSTRACTS:
Authors should submit an electronic version of an extended abstract (1000-1500 words). The abstract should be in doc, rtf or pdf format and be submitted by email to [email protected] before March 10, 2008.

WORKSHOP FORMAT:
Each participant will give a short presentation followed by discussion. For invited papers a commentator will be assigned. There will be a plenary discussion at the end of the workshop.

PUBLICATION:
We are currently considering reputable publishers for a book consisting of the best papers from the workshop. Full papers for inclusion in the book should be submitted before November 1, and will be peer-reviewed.

IMPORTANT DATES:
March 10 Extended abstract submission deadline
March 21 Notification of acceptance
June 12-14 Workshop
November 1 Submission of full paper (optional)

PRACTICAL INFORMATION:
There is no registration fee for the workshop, but participants cover their own expenses for travel and accommodation (inexpensive accommodation will be available). More information about transportation and local accommodation can be found on our Website: http://ceptes.nl/glita. If you have any questions regarding the
workshop, please direct them to [email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Web_site Histories: Theories, Methods, Analysis

Web_site Histories: Theories, Methods, Analysis

One-day conference, October 14th 2008. The main purpose of Web_site Histories is to place the new and emerging field of Web History on the research agenda and to map the field of historical website studies.

Organizer: The Centre for Internet Research, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

The conference is associated the AoIR 9.0 conference Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place in Copenhagen.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Kirsten Foot, Associate Professor, University of Washington
Steven Schneider, Professor, State University of New York

Title: Object-Oriented Web Historiography.

Abstract: Foot & Schneider will present a keynote address that focuses on their proposal of an ?object-oriented? approach to researching and writing Web history. They will consider the various meanings of object entailed within the notion of object-oriented Web historiography in order to advance both the theoretical foundation and methodological rigor of developmental analyses of Web artifacts in their hyperlinked contexts. Developmental analyses of any aspect of the Web, whether engaged in contemporaneously or retrospectively, entail dynamics within and between the (co)producers of Web artifacts, production practices and techniques, and Web artifacts themselves. These dynamics make it difficult but very important for scholars to identify and situate their object(s) of analysis historically and theoretically. See extended description at http://www.cfi.au.dk/en/events/conferences/wsh08/keynote.

Kirsten Foot and Steven Schneider are the authors of Web Campaigning (MIT Press 2006) as well as a number of articles about Web Sphere Analysis.

A panel will round off the conference by discussing the future directions of studies of Web History. Besides Kirsten Foot and Steven Schneider panel participant will be Niels Brügger, Associate Professor, the Centre for Internet Research, University of Aarhus.

The main purpose of Web_site Histories is to place the new and emerging field of Web History on the research agenda and to map the field of historical website studies. The focus on the Web can be seen as a specialization within the larger field of Internet History, but with another subset of questions and challenges. The underscore in
the title reflects the uncertainty and variability of the object of study are we talking about the Web in general, Web Spheres, individual websites, or web pages? The conference welcomes papers on any of these approaches or any other theme, topic or idea connected to the theories, methods or analysis of Web History. Theoretical approaches could be discussions of the object of study or reflections on doing historical research on this particular subject. Methodological approaches may include abstract or more specific considerations of the range of applicable methods, both old and new, to Web History. Finally, the analytical approach welcomes contributions exploring the practical hazards and possibilities of this special kind of empirical material, as well as papers on concrete empirical studies.

Papers are also welcome on a wide array of historically-grounded themes. The topics below are examples of the kinds of issues paper presenters are invited to address but are not intended to limit topics suitable for paper submissions:
· General as well as more specific histories of the development of the Web, focusing on, for instance, technology, graphic design, culture etc.
· The history of the Web as a subset of the history of the Internet, with emphasis on, for instance, the development of hardware, software and protocols
· The organizational architecture of the Web in a global, national, transnational or local perspective
· Defining moments and events on the Web, either in terms of how the Web was conceived and built, or in terms of how it is or was perceived and used
· Demographical, social, cultural, or other factors influencing Web use and uptake
· Political, economic, institutional or personal histories of the Web
· The growing popularity of social networking sites in a historical perspective
· Interactivity, genre and media discussions in relation to the Web
· The histories of expectations in pre-web time meeting the reality of the Web
· Source availability and validity ? the archiving of the Web
· The history of the Web in the larger framework of media history

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by April 15th 2008 (further instructions at (http://www.cfi.au.dk/en/wsh08). After a process of double-blind peer review, authors will be notified of accepted papers by May 15th. Full papers will be due by August 31st 2008. Please note that there is a maximum of 30 participants, and priority will be given to paper presenters. Paper presentations will consist of short presentations with opponents/discussants and roundtable-style discussions. Presenters are therefore also expected to act as opponents/discussants.

Participation in the conference is free, and coffee and lunch is included (yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch). Following the conference, papers will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume on Web Histories.

The conference takes place at the University of Aarhus, two days before the start of the AoIR 9.0 conference in Copenhagen (http://conferences.aoir.org). Aarhus is situated west of Copenhagen and is the second largest city in Denmark with a population of approximately 300,000. It is accessible by train or by air via the Aarhus or Billund airports. Read more about Aarhus and the university: http://www.au.dk/en/why and http://www.au.dk/en/aarhus.htm.

The Centre for Internet Research is located at the Institute of Information and Media Studies, and was established in September 2000 in order to promote research into the social and cultural implications and functions of the internet. Read more about the Centre: http://www.cfi.au.dk/en/about/profile

Conference website: http://www.cfi.au.dk/en/wsh08.

The conference is sponsored by:
· 'The Knowledge Society', a joint research priority area at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Aarhus,
· the Institute of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus
· the Centre for Internet Research, University of Aarhus.

About the organisers:
Niels Brügger (PhD, MA) is Associate Professor at the Institute of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, and co-founder of the Centre for Internet Research. His primary research interests are website history, web archiving, and the internet and media theory, and he recently started the research project "The history of
www.dr.dk, 1996-2006" (read more at http://imv.au.dk/~nb).

Vidar Falkenberg (MSc) is a PhD fellow at the Institute of Information and Media Studies, University of Aarhus, and a member of the Centre for Internet Research. His research is on the development of online newspapers in Denmark (read more at http://www.internetaviser.dk).

Posted by prolurkr at 07:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowships

In summer 2008, the Social Science Research Council will sponsor twelve (12) Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowships in the field of Critical Studies of Science and Technology Policy, with an emphasis on comparative and international topics. These fellowships will fund participating graduate students at US universities to pursue predissertation summer research and to attend two integrated workshops designed to prepare you to learn and explore research and dissertation proposal development strategies in STS and closely related fields.

Except in unique circumstances, applicants should be in their second or third year of PhD programs and must not yet have defended their dissertation prospectus prior to attending the workshops. The due date for applications is February 8, 2008, and applications must be filed through the SSRC application portal:

http://programs.ssrc.org/dpdf/

If you have any questions, they can be directed to one of us (regarding research topics and workshop plans) or the SSRC (regarding application procedures or technical help with online applications). We are also attaching a copy of the full announcement to this email.

This is a unique opportunity, and we very much hope that you will apply yourself or help us recruit an outstanding group of participants.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Special issue of JCMC on Young People, Mediated Discourse and Communication Technologies

Call for papers: Special issue of JCMC
for more info: http://faculty.washington.edu/thurlow/jcmc.html

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION
SPECIAL ISSUE ON
Young People, Mediated Discourse and Communication Technologies

CALL FOR PAPERS
Guest Editor:
Crispin Thurlow
University of Washington

IMPORTANT DATES
Abstracts due: July 1, 2008
Full papers due: November 1, 2008
Publication: April 2009

ISSUE FOCUS
After cybersex and e-commerce, perhaps the most widely discussed CMC-related issue is so called 'cyberkids' and the 'net generation'. Almost on a daily basis there are stories in the media addressing adult concerns about young people's involvement with new communication technologies like instant messaging, text messaging and social networking sites. These popular representations are often speculative, anecdotal and exaggerated. Young people are typically caught in a no-win situation: on the one hand, they are depicted as being somehow naturally predisposed and automatically 'wired' to new technologies; on the other hand, they are viewed as being enslaved to technology, as either arch-consumers or tragic victims.

CMC and new media scholars know well that generalizations about technologically-mediated communicative practices are inherently problematic, conflating as they do important differences in the affordances and constraints of different technologies. By the same token, the homogenizing rhetoric of 'net generation' and 'cyberkids' conceals the diversity of young people's lives and their experiences with communication technology. Most popular discourse also overlooks those disadvantaged young people who cannot simply take the internet and more recent technologies for granted.

This special issue of JCMC seeks to answer a simple question: what are young people really doing with new communication technology? Papers are sought which examine children and teenager's mediated discourse - in other words, their actual language and communication practices. Papers should therefore be empirically grounded, situated and contextual (e.g. user- and use-specific). By no means exhaustive, papers might address the following types of research questions:

* how are young people reworking standard linguistic forms and practices?
* how do young people themselves talk about new technology and/or its role in their lives?
* how are new technologies seen to be supporting young people's interpersonal needs?
* how are young people using technologies for artistic, political and other creative purposes?
* how are new communication technologies connecting different groups of young people?

Papers reporting findings from diverse and under-represented social backgrounds are especially welcome.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION
Potential authors should submit a preliminary proposal of 500 to 750 words by June 1, 2008 to the guest editor Crispin Thurlow (thurlow @ u.washington.edu - please put "JCMC Special Issue" in the subject line). Proposals should include the central research question, the theoretical and/or empirical basis for the paper and preliminary findings, interpretations or insights. Those interested in submitting a proposal are also encouraged to contact the guest editor with their questions and ideas.

Authors whose proposals are accepted will be invited (by August 1, 2008) to submit for review a full paper of roughly 7,000-10,000 words by September 1, 2008. The JCMC is an interdisciplinary journal and so authors should plan for papers that will be accessible to non-specialists and try to make their paper relevant to this audience. Anticipated publication date for the issue is April 2009.

Final submissions should be emailed to the guest editor, Crispin Thurlow at thurlow @ u.washington.edu. Again, please put "JCMC Special Issue" in the subject line. The usual JCMC manuscript guidelines should be followed.

NOTE ABOUT "YOUNG PEOPLE"
There is no shortage of scholarly research on college-age people - a convenient and often captive audience! As a consequence, it sometimes feels as if we know more about this period of the lifespan than we do about any others (Thurlow, 2005). In an attempt to redress this imbalance and to give voice to a major new-media constituency, this special issue will give priority to papers which make the experiences of children and teenagers a central focus - in other words, young people under the age of twenty (to use an otherwise arbitrary cut-off point). Papers which focus on young, college-age adults are encouraged to situate their data/analysis with reference to the broader lifespan.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Social Linking Track at Hypertext 2008: the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext

Social Linking Track at Hypertext 2008: the Nineteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia

June 19th-21st 2008, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

*** Social Linking Track: Call for Papers (technical paper submission deadline: February 11th 2008)

The ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia is the acknowledged venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on linking. The web, the semantic web and the Web 2.0 are all manifestations of the success of the link. The Hypertext Conference provides the forum for research that considers links, their semantics, their presentation, the applications they have been put to, the knowledge that can be derived from their analysis and their effect of society. If information is connected, then the connection is called a link, and the Hypertext Conference is concerned with all research concerning links. HT08 will consist of four independent tracks, each with its own track committee. In particular, we want to call your attention to the exciting track on Social Linking, co-chaired by Filippo Menczer (Indiana University) and Ciro Cattuto (ISI Foundation).

One of the most exciting recent developments in Web science is the rise of social annotation, by which users can easily markup other authors' resources via collaborative mechanisms such as tagging, filtering, voting, editing, classification, and rating. These social processes lead to the emergence of many types of links between texts, users, concepts, pages, articles, media, and so on. We welcome submissions on design, analysis, and modeling of information systems driven by social linking. Topics of interest include:

* Design of collaborative annotation mechanisms
* Critical mass and incentives of social participation (e.g. games)
* User interfaces for collaborative annotation
* Applications to search, retrieval, recommendation, and navigation
* Explicit vs. inferred social links (e.g. mining query logs)
* Integration with content-based systems (e.g. linking in blogs)
* Socially induced measures of similarity, relatedness, or distance
* Co-evolution of social, information, and semantic networks
* Analysis of structure and dynamics of social information networks
* Behavioral patterns of social linking
* Linguistic analysis of social annotation spaces
* Formal and generative models of social annotation
* Unstructured vs. structured social knowledge representations
* Implementation and scalability of social link representations
* Automatic and user-based evaluation
* Robustness against spam and other forms of social abuse

All submissions should be formatted according to the official ACM SIG proceedings template (http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/ template.html). Accepted papers will appear in the formal Conference Proceedings, published by ACM. All material will be available through the ACM Digital Library. Details about submission will be soon available at the conference site (http:// www.ht2008.org/). You can also find information there about the other HT08 tracks: Information Linking and Organization, Applications of Hypertext, and Hypertext, Culture, and Communication.

*** Social Linking Senior Program Committee:

* Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Junghoo Cho, UCLA
* Lee Giles, PSU
* Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs
* Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University
* Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research
* Luc Steels, Sony CSL Paris

*** Social Linking Program Committee:

* Lada Adamic, University of Michigan
* Ruj Akavipat, Indiana University
* Harith Alani, University of Southampton
* Andrea Baldassarri, Sapienza University of Rome
* Stefano Battiston, ETH Zurich
* Rik Belew, UCSD
* Dominik Benz, University of Kassel
* Johan Bollen, LANL
* Shannon Bradshaw, Drew University
* Andrea Capocci, Sapienza University of Rome
* Riley Crane, ETH Zurich
* Debora Donato, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Scott Golder, HP Labs
* Peter Hanappe, Sony CSL Paris
* Paul Heymann, Stanford University
* Bettina Hoser, University of Karlsruhe
* Andreas Hotho, University of Kassel
* Jeannette Janssen, Dalhousie University
* Pranam Kolari, Yahoo!
* Marc Light, The Thomson Corporation
* Bing Liu, UIC
* Vittorio Loreto, Sapienza University of Rome
* Ana Maguitman, Universidad Nacional del Sur
* Massimi Marchiori, University of Padova
* Ben Markines, ISI Foundation
* Paolo Massa, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
* Mark Meiss, Indiana University
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Evangelos Milios, Dalhousie University
* David Millen, IBM
* John Paolillo, Indiana University
* Filippo Radicchi, ISI Foundation
* Jacob Ratkiewicz, ISI Foundation
* Luis Rocha, Indiana University
* Heather Roinestad, Indiana University
* Vito D.P. Servedio, Sapienza University of Rome
* Frank Smadja, Toluna
* Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz
* Landau Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel
* Martin Svensson, Ericsson Research
* Eugenio Tisselli, Sony CSL
* Paris Roelof van Zwol, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
* Karin Verspoor, LANL
* Alan Wexelblat, HOVIR
* Le-Shin Wu, Indiana University

*** Technical Paper Stream

February 11th 2008 submission deadline
March 21st 2008 authors informed of results of reviewing
April 4th 2008 final Papers to ACM

Full Papers:
Full technical papers (10 pages) should present significant scientific advances that are at a mature stage of development. We are looking for full papers that present relevant contributions to research, development, and practice in the area of hypertext and hypermedia. We are also interested in survey papers which present an
authoritative and original perspective on an area of interest.

Short Papers:
Short papers (5 pages) should present interesting recent results or novel thought-provoking ideas that are not quite ready for a regular full-length paper, or where the research has limited scope or the results have lesser significance.

*** Posters and Demonstrations

March 28th 2008 submission deadline
April 9th 2008 committee decisions to authors
April 16th 2008 final copy to ACM

Poster presentations and demonstrations (2 pages in the proceedings) are solicited, which present new ideas, generate interest in a research area, or describe or demonstrate useful or interesting work that is not substantial enough for a technical paper presentation.

*** Organizaton

General Chair: Peter Brusilovsky, University of Pittsburgh
Program Chair: Hugh Davis, University of Southampton, UK
LOC Chair: Stephen Hirtle, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Treasurer: Rosta Farzan, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Program Track Chairs

Information Linking and Organization
Paul de Bra, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Frank Shipman, Texas A&M University, USA

Social Linking
Filippo Menczer, Indiana University, USA
Ciro Cattuto, ISI foundation, Italy

Applications of Hypertext
Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Hypertext, Culture, and Communication
Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Inc., USA

Workshop Chair: David Millard, University of Southampton, UK
Hyperdrama Festival: Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems, Inc., USA

*** Location

ACM Hypertext 2008 will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ranked #1 Most Livable City in America. It is co-located and scheduled directly after ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (http://www.jcdl2008.org/). The two conferences will meet again in Pittsburgh, 10 years years after ACM Hypertext 1998 and ACM Digital
Libraries 1998 were last co-located there. In 2008, both conferences are being hosted by the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh (http://www.sis.pitt.edu/). The Pittsburgh area is home to more than 25 colleges and universities, resulting in a vibrant and diverse community of learners and teachers. The region welcomes more than 10 million visitors each year, who enjoy amenities and cultural attractions including the world-class Carnegie Museums, the outstanding Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the decades-long tradition of major league sports! Pittsburgh is centrally located, being within 90 minutes flying time of the country's major metropolitan areas. While being challenged by the presentations at Hypertext 2008, don't miss an opportunity to sample the museums, the performing arts organizations and the city's charming and diverse neighborhoods.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Technology in Qualitative Research (TQR) [due date is near]

Champaign, Illinois Wednesday May 14, 2008

Call for Papers and Technology Showcase Demonstrations

“Computers have superior abilities for processing patterns, although humans remain superior at interpreting meaning in patterns” - Rosalind W. Picard

Call for Papers and Technology Showcase Demonstrations

This is the call for papers and Technology Showcase Demonstrations to be delivered during the pre-conference day on Creativity Tools in Qualitative Research, associated with the 4th International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry. We welcome your participation in the conference day as a delegate or as a presenter, and we are excited about this new forum to discuss qualitative research, technology, and creativity.

• Date: Wednesday May 14, 2008, (8:30 A.M. ­ 5:00 P.M.)

• Location: University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana (Illini Union)

Goals

The purpose of the pre-conference day is to engage researchers in a discussion of the relationship between qualitative research, technology, and creativity. The organizers welcome contributions in the following areas:

• 1) Theoretical frameworks used to understand the role of technology in qualitative research.

• 2) Ethical and social justice considerations in the use of technology in qualitative research.

• 3) The role, function and relevance of specific technologies in qualitative research.

• 4) The impact of the digitization of qualitative data on collection, storage, analysis, and distribution of findings.

• 5) The emerging technological issues influencing the preparation and instruction of qualitative researchers in their future engagement qualitative research.

Paper Presentation Information (see Technology Showcase Info at the bottom)

• Oral Paper Presentation Format

• Oral paper presentations (up to 25 minutes for each paper) should include a discussion of objectives, main points, conclusions and implications, followed by 5 minutes of question and answer for each paper. Two papers will be selected for each one-hour time period, and concurrent sessions may be held depending on the number and quality of submissions.

• Foci

• The pre-conference has an overarching goal of examining the Creativity Tools that inhabit the intersection of technology and qualitative inquiry. Any papers that address this intersection are welcome. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

1. Theories about creativity tools in qualitative research

• Examples: What does “creativity tool” mean in qualitative research? What theoretical arenas help us understand the interaction of technology and qualitative research? What are the assumptions, biases, and blinders that influence the development and use of technology in qualitative research? How is creativity fostered and thwarted through the intersection of technology and qualitative research?

2. Ethical and social justice considerations in the use of technology in qualitative research:

• Examples: What impact does the digital divide have on the use of technology in socially responsible research? Who owns the means to produce and the facilities to use such technology? How does technology ensure or threaten the honorable handling of sensitive information? How has technology influenced the positive and negative aspects of aggregated, cross-site analyses? How can the intersection of technology, creativity, and qualitative research provide an avenue for relevant research in social justice?

3. The role function and relevance of specific technologies in qualitative research:

• Examples: How is the analysis of non-textual, digital data providing new lenses for qualitative researchers? What impact has the use of qualitative data analysis software had on the practice of qualitative research? What forms of technology and specific technological tools are promoting or thwarting creative approaches to qualitative data? What is the impact of technology on the discussion of rigor and standards in qualitative research?

4. The impact of the digitization of qualitative data on collection, storage, analysis, and distribution of findings.

• What technologies are being used to collect and store qualitative data? How does digital data differ from other data, and what are the implications for data management? How have BLOGS, web sites, pdf files, etc. positively/negatively changed the distribution of (and access to) research findings? What technologies might we see in the next ten years that will influence the ways qualitative data is collected, stored, and analyzed, and the means through which it is distributed?

5. The emerging technological issues influencing the instruction of qualitative researchers in the craft of qualitative research.
• In what ways should technology be engaged in the instruction of qualitative methods for graduate students? With already scarce time allotted to qualitative methods instruction, what does the introduction of technology add/subtract to the syllabus? How does the use (or lack of use) of technology in qualitative methods instruction shape the way students find professional pathways? How are qualitative research professions influencing the form and content of technology use in qualitative methods instruction?

• While many of these foci overlap, submissions should indicate the general thrust of the submission and preferred strand for presentation. Note that the constellation of abstracts and proposals may influence the placement of your presentation in the larger program, although you will be informed of this placement prior to the conference and you may conduct your presentation as planned, regardless of the designated strand. You will have between 15 and 20 minutes to present, depending on placement.

Paper Proposal Submission Instructions

• All paper proposals are to be submitted online by the deadline of December 1, 2007. To submit a proposal for a paper presentation, use the same on-line conference submission form that collects all conference paper submissions, available on the ICQI2008 web site (http://www.icqi.org/). Note ­ do not use the “panel submission” form, and instead use the “paper/poster submission” form. From the “paper/poster submission” form, use the drop down arrow in the “submission to” window, and select the “Pre-Conference Session: a Day in TQR”. The intent is to assess the papers through a blind, peer-review process ­ so please be mindful of this goal when crafting your 150 word submission.

Technology Showcase Information

In addition to the paper presentations, the day includes a technology showcase. The ICQI 2008 Technology Showcase is meant to allow qualitative researchers to learn about Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) packages they are not familiar with or would like to learn more about. It is intended to allow presenters to meet researchers interested in exploring their software options.

The format is designed to meet both the needs of participants and presenters. All participants will be given a brief description of each presenter's package prior to the session. There will be four 12 - 15 minute introductory sessions for participants to meet with presenters for software demonstrations and brief questions if time allows. This will be followed by a 25 minute Q & A session, where participants can ask more in-depth questions of the presenter of their choice.

To submit an application as a showcase presenter, be sure to read all of the instructions in this paragraph. Use the same on-line conference paper/proposal submission form that collects all conference submissions, available on the ICQI2008 web site (http://www.icqi.org/). Note ­ do not use the “panel submission” form, and instead use the “paper/poster submission” form. From the “paper/poster submission” form, use the drop down arrow in the “submission to” window, and select the “Pre-Conference Session: a Day in TQR”. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you place “Showcase submission” at the top of the form to distinguish your proposal from a paper proposal.

Important Dates

• 1 December (Saturday), 2008 Deadline for submission of proposals

(Registration for attendees begins)

• 29 February (Friday), 2008 Notification of acceptance or regret

• If accepted, your piece will be presented at the conference. If accepted, within a week you will need to confirm your participation. Shortly thereafter you will be notified of your specific time/location, and the other presentations in your session.

• 14 May (Wednesday, 2008 Pre-conference day registration begins at 8:30 AM (program starts at 9:00AM)

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CFP - METAPHOR AND LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

Ibérica, the Official Journal of AELFE (Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos) will devote a Special Issue to the theme

METAPHOR AND LANGUAGES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

The issue will be open to papers from a broad cross-section within this field. Contributions are invited to cover traditional areas such as the use of metaphor in field specific academic disciplines, (for example Engineering, Business, Science or Law, to mention a few) and including possible pedagogical consequences but also insightful and innovative proposals researching the use of metaphor in the language deployed in professional or occupational settings, or in writing in general will be welcome.

People wishing to contribute are invited to submit their proposals in keeping with the following conditions and deadlines.

STAGE 1

1) Please submit an ABSTRACT (approximately 500 words, including relevant references) giving your tentative title and outlining, among others, the scope of your proposal, the empirical evidence upon which it will be based, the findings expected, underlining their innovative nature and the interest they could have for the research area of metaphor in the language used for specific purposes.
2) Deadline for receipt of Abstracts: 30th November 2007.
3) Abstracts should be edited with the programme MS Word and forwarded electronically as attachments to both the Editor of Ibérica: Ana Bocanegra Valle ([email protected]) and the Guest Editor for the Special Edition: Michael White ([email protected]).
4) On a separate sheet, authors are asked to provide (electronically also) personal contact details, affiliation and, if relevant, a brief account of prior research in the area.

STAGE 2
1) Abstracts will be reviews by peer referees. Selection will be made attempting to cater for as broad a cross-section as possible.
2) Authors of the selected proposals will be notified by 10th January 2008.
3) These authors should then submit their finished article by 15th April 2008.
4) Articles should follow the guidelines of AELFE style sheet and (on this occasion) not exceed 6,000 words (guidelines are available at:
http://www.aelfe.org/?s=normes&p=1 or directly from the editor).

STAGE 3

1) Final articles will be independently reviewed and authors should meet the suggestions indicated.
2) Publication objective: Ibérica, Issue 17, Spring 2009.

Any further queries can be addressed to the Editor or Guest Editor.

Ibérica, the Journal of AELFE, ISSN 1139-7241, is at present covered by the following abstracting/indexing services:
- BLL - Bibliography of Linguistic Literature. Bibliography of General
Linguistics and of English, German and Romance Linguistics
- CINDOC - Centro de Información y Documentación Científica
- Dialnet – Portal de difusión de la producción científica hispana
- DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals
- LATINDEX - Sistema Regional de Información en Línea para Revistas
Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal
- MLA Directory of Periodicals
- MLA International Bibliography
- SPPELL: Spanish Periodical Publications in English Language and Linguistics
- The Linguist List

and has been accepted for prompt coverage by:
- LLBA: Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts
- Linguistics Abstracts

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CFP - INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

CALL FOR QUANTITATIVE METHODOLOGY PAPERS

The International Journal of Social Research Methodology is a peer-reviewed publication that provides a focus for ongoing and emerging methodological debates across a range of approaches, both qualitative and quantitative methods, including mixed and comparative methods, as these relate to philosophical, theoretical, ethical, political and practical issues.

We are particularly interested in receiving submissions that provide innovative and reflective commentaries on the use of quantitative methods. These should be accessible to the general readership targeted by our Journal, rather than addressing complex statistical procedures. Discussion of the substantive focus of research should be illustrative of methodological issues, rather than the primary focus.

A description of the Journal’s remit and details of submission procedures can be found at: www.informaworld.com/srm

informaworld is the online home of publications from Taylor & Francis, Routledge, Psychology Press and Informa Healthcare Informa plc ("Informa") Registered Office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London, W1T 3JH. Registered in England and Wales - Number 3099067.
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CFP - Space = Interaction = Discourse

International conference

Plenary speakers:
* John A. Dixon, Lancaster University, UK
* Ole B. Jensen, Aalborg University, Denmark
* Elizabeth Keating, University of Texas at Austin, USA
* Lorenza Mondada, Université Lumière Lyon2, France
* Ron Scollon, Alaska, USA

Dates: 12th - 14th November 2008

Location: Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

Web site: http://www.placeme.hum.aau.dk/conf2008/

The aim of this international conference entitled "Space = Interaction = Discourse" is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives.

The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities in complex multimodal environments, with a special focus on place, mobility and the body. Thus, this conference welcomes contributions by scholars and doctoral students in a range of disciplines and fields of inquiry, including discourse studies, conversation analysis, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, interaction analysis, architecture, design, geography, sociology, anthropology, environmental psychology, mobility studies, ubiquitous computing, computer-supported
cooperative work and computer-supported cooperative learning. Please see the online call for papers for more details.

The conference will take place at Aalborg University, and it will consist of invited keynote lectures, parallel paper sessions and a workshop. The topics of the keynote lectures and workshop will be announced later.

Submissions are solicited for paper presentations (30 minutes including question time). Please submit an abstract and register on the website. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st February 2008. All submissions will be reviewed by the scientific committee. Notification of acceptance by 1st March 2008.

The registration fee is 1500 DKK (approx. 200 euro), which includes participation in the conference, a conference folder, the reception, three lunches and two coffee/tea breaks each day over the three days.

The conference is international and open to researchers, doctoral and graduate students.

If you would like to take part in this exciting conference, then please visit our website for further details: http://www.placeme.hum.aau.dk/conf2008/

For more information, contact the organiser: Paul McIlvenny [email protected]>

This conference is supported by the "PlaceME" Nordic research network (funded by NordForsk) and the Department of Language & Culture, Aalborg University.

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CFP - Ethics, Technology and Identity

Ethics, Technology and Identity
Delft/The Hague, June 18 - 20, 2008

This conference aims to discuss the theme of 'ethics and identity' in light of new (information) technology. Key-note speakers include: David Velleman, Oscar Gandy, Robin Dillon, David Shoemaker.

SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS
Authors should submit an electronic version of an extended abstract (total word count 800-1000 words). The extended abstract submission deadline is Friday 7th December 2007.  Please submit to: [email protected]

For more information: http://www.ethicsandtechnology.eu/ETI.

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CFP - The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media

The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media will hold its 11th International Conference in the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis July 8-11, 2008 (http://igelweb.org/igelweb/IGEL2008).

--IMPORTANT DATES:

IGEL Conference: July 8-11, 2008
IGEL Summer Institute: July 5-8, 2008

Deadline papers IGEL Conference: February 8, 2008.

--INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LITERATURE AND MEDIA

The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media (German acronym IGEL) is aimed at the advancement of empirical literary research through international and interdisciplinary cooperation (http://igelweb.org). IGEL was founded in 1987. Biennual meetings of the society have been hosted in Siegen (Germany), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Memphis, Budapest (Hungary), Nakoda (Canada), Utrecht (Netherlands), Toronto (Canada), Pécs (Hungary), Edmonton (Canada) and Munich (Germany).

--11TH IGEL CONFERENCE

The 11th International Conference of the Society will be held in the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis July 8-11, 2008. Keynote speakers include Douglas Biber and Roz Picard. Doug Biber (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~biber) is internationally known for his computational techniques to analyze the linguistic characteristics of spoken and written genres and registers. Roz Picard (http://web.media.mit.edu/~picard) is the international authority on affective computing.

The IGEL Conference will follow the IGEL Summer Institute, July 5-7. The Program of the Summer Institute is concerned with the cooperation of Humanities and Social Science students in order to develop adequate methods for the empirical investigation of literature and the media.

The IGEL Conference will precede the Society for Text and Discourse workshop (July 11-12) and the 18th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse (July 12-15), also held in the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis (http://www.societyfortextanddiscourse.org).

--CALL FOR PAPERS

Presentations of the 11th International Conference can be in the form of posters or spoken papers. The deadline for submitting proposals for both presentation formats is February 8, 2008. A Review Committee will review the proposals, and authors will be notified regarding acceptance by the end of March 2008.

Please submit proposals in English to the website that will be made available towards the submission deadline (please see http://igelweb.org/igelweb/IGEL2008).

Papers will be scheduled for 20 minutes, with an additional 5 minutes for questions and discussion. Posters are scheduled for a poster session on the second night of the conference.

Proposals for symposia (sessions with multiple papers on one particular topic) should be discussed with the conference organizers prior to submission and follow the same procedure as proposals for papers ([email protected]). Their review process is the same as that or full papers.

--TOPICS FOR PAPERS, POSTERS AND SYMPOSIA

Examples of topics for papers, posters, symposia and workshops include:

• Literary reading processes (emotion, cognition, personality, etc.)
• Computational linguistic and corpus linguistic methods of research on literature and the media (text analysis, corpus studies, hypertext models, etc.)
• The social role of literature and related media (e.g. film, theatre, Internet, multimedia, virtual reality)
  
• Pedagogical and educational aspect of literature and the media
  
• The processes of literary/media production, distribution and reception
  
• The role of literary and other cultural institutions: past, present and future
  
• The empirical study of historical reception and historical readers
  

1. The title of the presentation
2. Names and institutional affiliations all authors, including email addresses of all authors
3. Contact Address for presenting author
4. Presentation Preference (Poster, Paper or Either)
5. A 75-word abstract of the presentation for publication in the abstracts booklet.
6. A summary of the presentation with a title but no author information (max. 1000 words, including bibliographic references). 
   

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CFP - Exploring New Media Worlds: Changing Technologies, Industries, Cultures, and Audiences in Global and Historical Context

An international conference hosted by Texas A&M University,
February 29 to March 2, 2008

Integrating fields of study in a time of change; setting a new agenda for media studies.

Papers and proposals are invited on any aspect of the conference themes, offering reports of new research, position-taking conceptual essays, discussions of media and telecommunication policy, and both international and historical comparisons on changing technologies, industries, cultures, and audiences.

The program will include keynote speakers, roundtable discussions, thematic panels, prominent scholars as respondents, and time for interaction.  A wide selection of papers from the conference will be published.  Travel grants are available for student members of the National Communication Association (see our webpage for more information).

Keynote speakers: Lawrence Grossberg; Steve Jones; Vincent Mosco; and Ellen Seiter.

Confirmed participants: Carole Blair, Sandra Braman, Celeste Condit, Bruce Gronbeck, Andrea Press, Ronald Rice, Paddy Scannell, Arvind Singhal, Joseph Turow, Angharad Valdivia.

Send papers or proposals (abstracts or annotated outlines) with a 50 word professional biography by email attachment to [email protected]  Panel proposals are also acceptable. Deadline: November 20, 2007.

For more information see http://comm.tamu.edu/mediaworlds or email [email protected] or [email protected]

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CFP - Applying and Extending Qualitative Inquiry to Internet Research

As the number of academic studies utilizing qualitative research methods on internet data has increased, so have the questions and issues surrounding how one does research in/on online sites. Experienced researchers and novices grapple with multiple issues as they adapt, modify, and develop various research methods to online venues including chatrooms, instant messaging, blogs, social utilities, webpages, games, and 3-D virtual worlds such as Second Life. How does one identify sites for one's study? What sampling procedures work best? What software is to be used in internet research? What are the benefits and weaknesses of using particular methods?  What issues arise when adapting a particular qualitative method for use in/on an online site?

We call for abstracts and papers that address these issues for a panel or series of panels, at The Fourth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2008) - Ethics, Evidence and Social Justice (http://www.icqi.org/) that will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from May 14-17, 2008. In particular, we are interested in presentations that look at qualitative methods and the difficulties researchers encounter as they do or have done internet research. Our focus is not on results; rather we are looking for colleagues interested in sharing knowledge and discussing challenges of the "nuts and bolts" of internet research.

The list of qualitative methods to consider includes but is not limited to:

• Discourse analysis
• Ethnography
• Interviews and surveys
• Narratives and biographies

Interested parties should email 1000 character (approximately 150 words) abstracts for each paper or presentation by November 15, 2007 to the organizers.

Please include the following information for each author with your submission:  Author's Name, Department, University, Address including City, State/Province, ZIP/Post Code, Country (if not US, please specify if you need a visa for travel), Telephone/Fax, E-mail.

Lois Ann Scheidt and Inna Kouper (Organizers)
Doctoral Students
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
lscheidt at indiana dot edu
inkouper at indiana dot edu

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CFP - 6th Biennial International Auto/Biography Association Conference

The 6th Biennial International Auto/Biography Association ConferenceHonolulu, Hawai‘i
June 23-26, 2008
Conference Topic: Life Writing and Translations

The Center for Biographical Research and the International Auto/Biography Association invite scholars from around the world to attend the 6th IABA conference, which will be held at the East-West Center, next to the campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, in Honolulu.

Translation is central to all forms of representation; the theme for this conference is Life Writing and Translations, in the widest sense of the term. We welcome papers dealing with the following kinds of translation, and others as well:

• Linguistic—Accounts of language acquisition, and their relation to senses of identity, of relations with others, of community, of separateness. Immigrant life writing narratives. Indigenous peoples and life writing. Poly-lingual texts. Polyphonic and heteroglossic texts. And of course, the translation of life writing texts from one language to another.

• Generic—Life writing texts often move from one literary, artistic, disciplinary, technological, or rhetorical form to another. Papers can deal with representing peoples’ lives in any medium—film, graphic text, writing, image, performance. They can examine the adaptation of one representational form to another—from book to film, from film to musical, from orature to literature, from page to stage to page, from popular confession to auto-ethnography, from case study to gossip. Or they can look at multi-generic works—online life writing incorporating visual, aural, and textual dimensions, or performance works combining presence and representation in several media.

• Cultural—Cultural translation involves the vexed but necessary efforts to communicate central ideas, histories, concerns, desires, needs, politics, identities from one cultural position or community to another. Translation is the act that takes place in Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone, or on Greg Dening’s beach, or at a Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearing. Translation is often the negotiating of issues of gender, race, class, and disability (transnational, transgender, transcultural). Translation, as movement between states or spaces—transits, transitions—also shapes travel narratives. Translation, as a mediation between past and present, takes into account historical specificity. And translation participates in the political and cultural dynamics between nations, and national groups.

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CFP - The Long History of New Media: Contemporary and Future Developments Contextualized

The Long History of New Media: Contemporary and Future Developments Contextualized

International Communication Association Communication History Interest Group Pre-conference Workshop
Montreal, 21 May 2008

This ICA pre-conference explores the historical dimension of new media with regard to theoretical foundations, methodological approaches, and contemporary developments. The historical dimension of these facets of new media scholarship is all too often inadequately addressed. The purpose of this pre-conference, then, is to bring together scholars with a common interest in exploring the historical contextualization of new media. This purpose is situated within a wider celebration of the 10th anniversary of New Media & Society as a leading journal for scholarly exploration of new forms of mediated communication. This anniversary will culminate in a special issue of the journal drawing from papers submitted to this pre-conference.

We welcome papers on a wide array of historically-grounded themes. The following illustrations of topics suggest - but are not intended to limit - topics suitable for paper submissions:
* Theoretical constructs such as 'interactivity' and 'digital divide' as applied to computer-mediated communication as well as mass media within different historical contexts;
* Contemporary 'promises' of the Internet (e.g., facilitation of political discourse and engagement) compared with the promises of other media (e.g., radio, television) in previous historical periods;
* Ethical considerations in conducting online ethnography as compared to such considerations during early anthropological studies;
* Aspects of Web survey methods (e.g., sampling, instrument design and deployment) compared to social survey research initiatives in the 1940s-50s;
* Comparison of Internet Studies, Cyberinfrastructure, and e-Science developments from an history of science perspective;
* Examination of the purposes of social networking sites (e.g., Friendster, MySpace) for youth as compared to social activities of young people prior to the 'Internet era';
* The Web browser 'wars' compared to the tumultuous introduction of other communication technologies.
* Issues relating to the methodology of the history of new media.

Abstracts of ca. 300 words should be submitted no later than 1 November. Send abstracts to: David Park, Chair of the ICA Communication History Interest Group, at [email protected] Authors will be informed whether abstracts have been accepted by 21 November 2007. Papers will be due by May 1, 2008. The program for this re-conference will take place in the afternoon of Wednesday 21 May 2008, the date established for ICA pre-conferences. The available time allows for three consecutive blocks of short presentations and roundtable-style discussions.

The pre-conference is a joint initiative by the Communication History Interest Group of the ICA and New Media & Society. The pre-conference will be held at McGill University, which is walking distance from the ICA conference venue.

Organized by
* David W. Park, Chair of ICA Communication History Interest
Group, http://www.icahdq.org/sections/secdetinfo.asp?SecCode=DIV23
* Nicholas Jankowski and Steve Jones, co-editors New Media &
Society, http://newmediaandsociety.com

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CFP - Video and Computer Game Studies

Video and Computer Game Studies
Computer Culture Area
The 29th Annual Meeting of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
Albuquerque, New Mexico
February 13-16, 2008

The Computer Culture Area of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association welcomes paper, panel, and other proposals in video and computer game studies. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Alternative reality games
Archiving and artifactual preservation
Economic and industrial histories
Educational game design and development
Foreign language games and culture
Game advertising (both in-game and out)
Haptics and interface studies
Localization
Luddology and other theories of play
Machinima
MOGs, MMOGs, and other forms of online/networked gaming
Narratology
Performance
Pornographic games
Religion and games
Representations of race and gender
Representations of space and place
The rhetoric of games and game systems
Serious games
Table-top game design and theory
Technological, aesthetic, economic, and ideological convergence
Wireless and mobile gaming

For Paper Proposals:

Please submit 250 word abstract embedded in the body of an email. Include contact information (e.g., postal and preferred email address, phone and fax numbers, etc.) and a biographical note about your connection to the topic.

For Panel and Other Proposals:

Feel free to query first. Panel and other proposals should include all of the information requested for individual paper proposals, as well as a 100-word statement of the panel's raison d'etre and any noteworthy organizational features.

As always, proposals are welcome from any and all scholars, including graduate students, independent scholars, and tenured, tenure-track, and emeritus faculty. Also, unusual formats, technologies, and the like are encouraged.

Send proposals by November 15, 2007 to:

Judd Ruggill
School of Media Arts
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
[email protected]

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CFP - International Working Conference on Virtuality and Society

IFIP WG 9.5 International Working Conference on Virtuality and Society: Massive Virtual Communities

Organizers: Niki Panteli, Martin Warnke

Date: July 1st and 2nd, 2008

Place: Leuphana University of Lueneburg, Germany

Scope & Theme

Prominently within the gaming community, but also within other communities on the internet, very huge virtual communities begin to evolve. In games, an average number of people that is comparable to a smaller city is online at the same time, thus forming a proper society. People share their pictures and videos, they meet and date in virtual communities. In Second Life, even big companies start virtual branches to enhance customer relations. It is likely that this phenomenon will become even more significant in the near future for gaming, for business and private purposes, maybe even for administrative and political functions.

It is already obvious that those massive virtual communities will have a substantial impact on society, economics, art, and -last but not least -technology. The workshop will bring together experts of that field to collect insights on a emerging major subject.

Program committee

Wolfgang Coy (Humboldt University Berlin, D)
Velvet Landingham (Kent State University Geauga, USA)
Niki Panteli (University of Bath, UK)
Claus Pias (University of Vienna, A)
Bryan K. Temple (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK)
Martin Warnke (Leuphana University Lueneburg, D)

The papers are published online as preprints. A book publication is intended.

Important dates

Deadline for full papers (previously unpublished material, not exceeding 12 pages single spaced, pdf format: January 15th, 2008, to be sent by e-mail to [email protected]

Notification of acceptance: March 15th, 2008

Conference fee: 100 Euro including an evening program at the first day of the conference and coffee breaks.

Venue

Lueneburg is a smaller city in northern Germany, near Hamburg. It has a lively university and a medieval city centre. The famous Lueneburg heath is not far away. There will be a limited number of hotel rooms at special rates when booked early.

Details on http://www.leuphana.de/ifip_mass_virt_comm/accommodation

Sponsored by IFIP 9.5 Working Group "Virtuality and Society" http://www.ifip95wg.org/

Co-sponsored by the Gesellschaft fuer Informatik e. V., Section Computers and Society, Working Group "Computers as Media"

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CFP - Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
March 31-April 2, 2008
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

http://www.icwsm.org/2008/

Call For Papers

The rapid creation and consumption of social media content continues to drive the evolution of the Internet and the Web. Social media content now accounts for the majority of content published daily on the web.

As the space evolves, researcher and industrial practitioners find themselves at a key point for collaborating on research, implementation and deployment of a wide range of analyses and applications. The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media invites researchers in the broad field of social media analysis to submit papers for its second meeting. Following in the tradition of earlier workshops and the first meeting in Boulder, USA in 2007, we anticipate an exciting, high quality event which will bring together academic and industrial
practitioners to present and to discuss new research, applications, thoughts and ideas that are shaping the future of social media analysis.

Areas of interest

The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas including computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies and foster
discussions about ongoing research in the following areas:

[01] Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of social media
[02] Analyzing relationship between social media and mainstream media
[03] Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs
[04] Data acquisition: crawling/spidering and indexing
[05] Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation
[06] Multimedia; audio/visual processing; aggregating information from different modalities
[07] Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization
[08] Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management; collaborative creation of structured knowledge
[09] Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction
[10] Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering
[11] Text categorization; topic recognition; gender/age identification
[12] Time series forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media
[13] Trend identification/tracking
[14] Visualization
[15] New social media applications; interfaces; interaction techniques
[16] Trust; reputation; recommendation systems

Important Dates

Paper Submission: December 3, 2007
Tutorial Proposals: December 3, 2007
Poster/Demo Submission: January 6, 2007
Paper Acceptance: February 1, 2008
Poster/Demo Acceptance: February 8, 2008
Camera Ready Copies: February 15, 2008
Tutorials: 30 March, 2008
Conference: 31 March, 2008 - 2 April, 2008

Submission

Individuals interested in participating should submit through the conference website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by the deadlines given above (Midnight PST). Each submission should indicate a list of relevant areas from the list above.

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CFP - Web2.0 & e-Social Science Workshop at e-Social Science 2007

e-Social Science 2007
October 7-9, Ann Arbour, Michigan, US

Call for position papers

Goals & Objectives

In recent years, the concept of the so-called “Social Web” has emerged that is similar to the World Wide Web but, instead of linking documents, links people, organizations, and concepts. It describes the collaborative effort of users to make sense of and provide context to the Internet.

The term Web2.0 has emerged, not as a new version of the internet, but as a new way of using it, facilitating collaboration and sharing between users. Web2.0 is associated with blogs and wikis where users can keep publicly available online diaries (a new medium for project diaries?) and volunteer contributions to online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia. Social network sites such as MySpace allow users to create a profile listing their likes, dislikes and favourites (in music, videos, etc.). This stimulates the emergence of networks of friends and people with similar interests. Social tagging, where users tag resources with keywords coined by themselves, has been applied to photos, websites and academic papers, amongst others. The social bookmark and publication sharing systems BibSonomy and Connotea allow users to tag websites and publications and to share these tags with other members of the community. The tags can be used to search for resources that other people have tagged, thus providing a different (more effective and user-centric) way of searching the internet.

We invite position papers on the following topics:

1. The role Web2.0 technologies play in delivering enhanced e-social science tools. Bibsonomy and Connotea stimulate collaboration by enabling users to easily share interesting publications, websites etc. We wish to explore in which other ways Web2.0 technologies can be used to support e-social science.

2. The role of Web2.0 tools as social science research tools in their own right. How can wikis, blogs, etc. be used to gather information, as alternatives to the more classic methods of interviews and questionnaires?

3. Studies of Web2.0 environments and communities. Web2.0 communities are interesting phenomena in their own right; we are interested in studies into the social aspects of these phenomena.

Intended Participants

This workshop is intended for participants working or interested in the cross-over areas between e-social science and Web2.0 mentioned above.

Programme/Format

The workshop will comprise one keynote presentation, plus a series of short presentations on submitted position papers (20 mins duration) addressing one or more of the themes above. The event will conclude with a discussion/agenda-setting session.

Position papers (max. two A4 pages in length) should be sent to the workshop organisers by email to the following addresses: [email protected], [email protected]

Important Dates

August 27 Submission deadline
August 31 Notification
October 7 Workshop
Workshop Registration

Workshop participants must register for e-Social Science 2007 (http://ess.si.umich.edu/index.htm).

Organiser Biographies

o Peter Edwards is Director of the ESRC funded PolicyGrid NCeSS Node at the University of Aberdeen. He is a Computer Scientist with interests in the Semantic Grid and knowledge technologies, and has worked in the area of e-social science since 2004. He is working to integrate aspects of Web2.0 technology with the Grid to support community driven e-science.

o Alison Chorley is a postdoctoral research fellow working at the PolicyGrid Node. Her interests are in the area of flexible provenance management and argumentation support for e-social science.

o Feikje Hielkema is a research assistant on PolicyGrid, interested in the integration of natural language techniques with advanced Web technologies to enhance the e-social scientist’s user experience.

o Edoardo Pignotti is a graduate student funded by the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability; previously he worked as a research assistant on the ESRC funded FearlusG e-social science project. He is interested in novel tools to support workflow in e-science.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Call for Papers: Edited Collection on Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Editor : Radhika Gajjala

In the recent past, there has been much talk of "web 2.0 " and "web 3D" as new media. Educators and researchers all over the world are debating the pros and cons of such environments. MMORPGs (Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and online 3D environments for social and economic activity.  Immersive environments such as secondlife are being examined from multiple disciplinary lenses. This edited will include articles based in examinations of embodiment, performativity, gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and globalization critically, and will be open to multiple disciplinary intersections.

Click, for more info on this CFP.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Twenty First Century Teenager: Media Representation, Theory and Policy

Twenty First Century Teenager: Media Representation, Theory and Policy

A conference hosted by the Association for Research in Popular Fictions

10th-12th July,2008 Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds

TV drama, young adult fiction, music, art, citizenship agenda, documentary, photography, journalism, pedagogy, youth culture, social exclusion, child poverty, curriculum and literacy, sub-culture, new media, disability, teen audiences, magazines/comics, juvenile delinquency, beauty and lifestyle, pop and politics, internet cultures, texting and social ritual, teen nights and street culture, ASBOs and Hoodies, comparative studies.

Please send an abstract of 200-300 words by December 15th 2007 to Nickianne Moody, Convenor ARPF, MCCA, Liverpool John Moores University, Dean Walters Building, St James Road, Liverpool L1 7BR E-mail [email protected] Fax 0151 6431980

Posted by prolurkr at 08:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

CFP - Journal Culture, Language and Representation

Journal Culture, Language and Representation,Volume 5 to appear in May 2008 will be devoted to:

Intermediality in Contemporary Culture

Intermediality is associated with the blurring of traditionally ascribed generic and formal boundaries through the incorporation of digital media into all forms of cultural practice, and the presence of one or more media in the space and form of another medium. This has led to the creation of intermedial spaces in-between media and a proliferation of texts, inter-texts, hyper-texts, hyper-fictions, and acts of remediation, transmediality, multimediality, hypermediality and a bewildering blur of associated realities. We live in an increasingly intermedial world where the human-computer interface places us in the position of being in-between media and the different realities they create.

Intermediality is the modern way to experience life; where reality is glimpsed through computer screens and reached through fingers tapping mobile phone touch pads. In this screen-saving world we are not sure what is 'live' and what is 'mediatized' and if we can differenciate between them anymore. Through digital technology, intermediality has become part of the global phenomenon that has the ability to link cultural communities in cyberspace. However, intermediality may also operate at the level of the individual artist as a medium using their body, voice and mind to inter-act with other media, and crucially, in the perception of the receiver/critic who interprets the intermedial scene.

Suggestions for investigation are given below but are not considered to be exclusive:

1. Theoretical reflections on ntermediality and intermedial processes.
2. Critical analysis of specific examples of intermediality in literature, cinema, television, the digital media or the performing arts of theatre, dance and music.
3.Intermedial representations of gender and identity in contemporary culture.
4. In-between the live and mediatized: how concepts of private and public space may be changing in an intermedial world.
5. Ethical and legal issues of intermedial representation in cyberspace.
6. Intermediality in theatre and performance.
7. Education and intermediality - new spaces for intermedial learning.
8. Historical perspectives on intermediality in the arts,literature, film, or any other field involving creative processes.
9. In-between thereal and the imagined realities of intermedial discourse.
10. Intermedial communitie and cultures.
11. Performativity and intermediality.
12. Intermediality / inter-disciplinarity / interculturalism.

Deadline for Submissions: 15 September 2007

Enquiries concerning this Call for Papers may be addressed to:
Freda Chapple ([email protected])

Any enquiries about the journal should be addressed to:
Jose R. Prado ([email protected])

Articles in English should be posted to:
Freda Chapple
Guest Editor
Culture, Language and Representation
University of Sheffield
School of Education, Institute for Longlife learning
196-198 West Street
Sheffield S1 4ET
UK

Articles in Spanish to be posted to:
Jose R. Prado
Campus Riu Sec
Universitat Jaume I
12071 Castellon
Spain

Posted by prolurkr at 08:30 PM | TrackBack

CFP - HICSS genre minitrack--paper due date 15 June 2006

Call for papers--HICSS Minitrack on Genres of Digital Documents

Genres are communicative actions with a socially recognized communicative purpose and/or common aspects of form (such as newsletters, FAQs, and homepages). Genres are situated in complex communicative practices; they are anchored in specific institutions and processes and can be equally applicable to physical as well as electronic documents. For successful organizational and societal implementations of digital media, understanding of the interplay and co-evolution between social and organizational purposes of communication
and affordances of new media plays a crucial role. In a digital information environment, documents have functionality as well as form and content, but in many ways the contextual clues are missing. For this reason, the genre lens provides certain fixity in communication and becomes increasingly important in providing users a resource for the interpretation of the content, role, and function of digital documents.

Genre theory has inspired analysis and design of a number of types of information systems and solutions such as e-learning, document/content management systems, electronic meeting systems, newspaper services, and mobile media services. The genre lens has even been suggested as a basis for critical debate and validation of new document and communication
solutions.

Topics of the minitrack will address the social and organizational aspects of genre and their interplay with genre forms as manifested in digital media. These include (but are not limited to):

*  Issues related to transformation of genres from a medium to another
*  The evolution of genres of digital documents
*  Understanding of change and socio-organizational enactment processes of genres, genre systems, and genre repertoires
*  Investigations of genre in use
*  Analyses of genres emerging in novel digital media, e.g. the Web, mobile communication technologies, e-mail, instant messaging, multi-media communication environments
*  Genres in non-text and multi-media digital documents
*  Role of genre in development and design of information systems, knowledge management, and information management in the organizational and societal context
*  Theoretical and methodological elaborations of genre theory for enhancing research and/or practice of utilizing digital media in the societal and organizational context
*  Use of the genre theory as a research tool
*  Genre-based design of systems and use of the genre lens in systems development processes (e.g. planning, requirements analysis, benchmarking, etc.)
*  Role of genre awareness and recognition in information and IT usage

HICSS will be held 7-10 January 2008 at the Hilton Waikoloa Village Resort, Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii. HICSS Proceedings are published and distributed by the IEEE Computer Society and carried on the IEEE Digital Library.

The firm deadline to submit papers is 15 June 2007. Authors will receive decisions regarding paper acceptances by 15 August 2007.  We would be happy to provide guidance and indication of appropriate content, so please feel free to contact us with an abstract at any time. Papers should be submitted on the reviewing system following the instructions on the HICSS website. For the latest information on the conference, please visit the HICSS web site at:    http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu or the mirror sites:   
http://hicss.sepa.tudelft.nl/    and   http://www.is.cityu.edu.hk/hicss/

Minitrack co-chairs:

Carina Ihlström Eriksson, Assistant Professor
School of Information Science, Computer and Electrical Engineering
Halmstad University
P.O. Box 823
S-301 18 Halmstad
Sweden
Phone: +46 35 167531
[email protected]
http://www.hh.se/staff/caih

Tero Päivärinta, Associate Professor
Department of Information Systems
Agder University College
P.O. Box 422
N-4604 Kristiansand
Norway
Phone: +47 3814 1662
[email protected]
http://home.hia.no/~terop/

Kevin Crowston, Professor
Syracuse University
School of Information Studies
348 Hinds Hall
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 USA
Phone: +1 (315) 443-1676
Fax: +1 (866) 265-7407
Web: http://crowston.syr.edu/

Posted by prolurkr at 12:32 PM

A paid blogging job anyone?

Blogger/Digital Media Coordinator

AARP is looking for a blogger to develop, coordinate and promote the organization's blog presence. The ideal candidate would have 3-5 years experience professionally blogging with a understanding of media and politics, as well as a working knowledge of HTML coding, HomeSite and related web development technologies; experience working in a collaborative team environment with designers and technical staff; and knowledge of Association strategic objectives and stakeholders in order to promote AARP's mission, values, and strategic goals.

This is a new position for AARP in their communications dept. The plan is to go really high profile with this... the blogger will be very visible, do TV and become famous, perhaps. It is a great platform for the right, high energy, charismatic individual!

Mara Covell
Senior Vice President
The Howard Sloan Koller Group
300 East 42nd Street
Suite 1500
New York, NY 10017
212-661-5250 V
212 763-1504 V
212-557-9178 F
mcovell_at_hsksearch.com

Posted by prolurkr at 06:10 PM | TrackBack

CFP - BLOGS, WIKIS, AND SCHOLARSHIP IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Blogs & Wikis
MPCA/MACA - Region Conference
October 12-14, 2007
Radisson Hotel and Suites, Kansas City, Missouri

Abstract Submission Deadline: April 30, 2007

BLOGS, WIKIS, AND SCHOLARSHIP IN HIGHER EDUCATION
The Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture 
Association is seeking papers on the use of blogs, wikis, or other 
collaborative online technologies in higher education.

Possible topics include:
•        case studies of blogs or wikis in the classroom
•        the wiki in academic research
•        the blogging professorate
•        digital publishing and the tenure dossier

Please send a brief abstract (250 words) and a note about your field 
and institutional affiliation by April 30, 2007. Email submissions 
and inquiries to Molly at this address: <mem96_at_georgetown.edu>

For more information on the conference, see http://www.mpcaaca.org/

Molly Moran
Graduate student, Program in Communication, Culture, and Technology, 
Georgetown University
New Media Advisor, U.S. Department of State
Washington, DC
mem96_at_georgetown.edu
moranme_at_state.gov
202.663.0244

Posted by prolurkr at 04:25 PM | TrackBack

CFP - International Journal of Internet Research Ethics

International Journal of Internet Research Ethics
http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/ijire.html

Description and Scope:

The IJIRE is the first peer-reviewed online journal, dedicated specifically to cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research on Internet Research Ethics. All disciplinary perspectives, from those in the arts and humanities, to the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, are reflected in the journal.

With the emergence of Internet use as a research locale and tool throughout the 1990s, researchers from disparate disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to humanities to the sciences, have found a new fertile ground for research opportunities that differ greatly from their traditional biomedical counterparts. As such, "populations," locales, and spaces that had no corresponding physical environment became a focal point, or site of research activity. Human subjects protections questions then began to arise, across disciplines and over time: What about privacy? How is informed consent obtained? What about research on minors? What are "harms" in an online environment? Is this really human subjects work? More broadly, are the ethical obligations of researchers conducting research online somehow different from other forms of research ethics practices?

As Internet Research Ethics has developed as its own field and discipline, additional questions have emerged: How do diverse methodological approaches result in distinctive ethical conflicts and, possibly, distinctive ethical resolutions? How do diverse cultural and legal traditions shape what are perceived as ethical conflicts and permissible resolutions? How do researchers collaborating across diverse ethical and legal domains recognize and resolve ethical issues in ways that recognize and incorporate often markedly different ethical understandings?

Finally, as "the Internet" continues to transform and diffuse, new research ethics questions arise e.g., in the areas of blogging, social network spaces, etc. Such questions are at the heart of IRE scholarship, and such general areas as anonymity, privacy, ownership, authorial ethics, legal issues, research ethics principles (justice, beneficence, respect for persons), and consent are appropriate areas for consideration.

The IJIRE will publish articles of both theoretical and practical nature to scholars from all disciplines who are pursuing or reviewing IRE work. Case studies of online research, theoretical analyses, and practitioner-oriented scholarship that promote understanding of IRE at ethics and institutional review boards, for instance, are encouraged. Methodological differences are embraced.

Posted by prolurkr at 03:09 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular

Posted by prolurkr at 09:00 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Life Writing Conference (UK)

New deadline

The Spirit of the Age:
Debating the Past, Present and Future of Life Writing

4-6 July 2007, Kingston University London

Call for Papers

Speakers to include: Neal Ascherson, Rachel Cusk, John Fuegi, Victoria Glendinning, Kathryn Hughes, Hanif Kureishi, Annette Kobak, Blake Morrison, Virginia Nicholson, Hilary Spurling, Roberta Taylor and Claire Tomalin.

This, the first international interdisciplinary Conference on the Writing of Lives to be hosted jointly by the new Life Narratives Research Centre and the Faculties of Art and Social Science, and Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, aims to invite debate across these disciplines on the particular issues that have surrounded the writing of lives in the past, and to foster discussion on the challenges and opportunities facing such endeavors today and tomorrow. Hegel famously suggested, "the great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he
actualises his age".

The Spirit of the Age conference is seeking to bring about interdisciplinary discussions and debates around the notion of Hegel's model of the making of an age by calling for papers from
academics and practitioners working on life writing in any area of the arts or the academy on the topics listed below.

* Life Writing that defines an Age
* Marginal Lives and Historical Revision
* Witness/Survivor Memoirs
* Writing Lives in the Arts
* The Author as Subject: Writing Literary Lives
* Group Work: Writing on Multiple Subjects
* Writing Political Lives
* Short Lives/The Obituary
* Objects as Subjects: Writing Lives of the Material World

Proposals for panels, papers, workshops, round tables, film and interview presentations by practitioners and researchers should be submitted as abstracts of up to 300 words by Friday 30th March 2007 to:

Penny Tribe,
'Spirit of the Age' Abstracts Administrator,
Kingston University,
Faculty of Art and Social Sciences
Penrhyn Road Kingston
KT1 2EE
Tel: +44 (0)208 547 2000

Email: fass-conferences_at_kingston.ac.uk   

Abstracts can also be submitted via our online form at:
http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/conferences/spirit_of_the_age/

Conference Organisers: Dr Meg Jensen, Dr Jane Jordan and Professor Brian Brivati

Posted by prolurkr at 10:04 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Interdisciplinary Conference on Culture, Language, and Social Practice

The program in Culture, Language and Social Practice (CLASP) at the University of Colorado at Boulder is pleased to invite submissions to its first graduate student-run interdisciplinary conference. Abstracts for 20 minute papers covering topics in various areas of sociocultural linguistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocultural_linguistics) are invited for either the General Session or the Theme Session (see below) and are due by April 15, 2007. For both Sessions, we encourage papers that focus on the broad connections between language, culture and society and are grounded in empirical research. Examples of possible frameworks or analytic traditions for either Session may include, but are not limited to:

Sociolinguistics
Linguistic anthropology
Narrative studies
Critical discourse analysis
Conversation analysis
Language and identity
Discourse pragmatics
Computer-mediated discourse
Ethnography of speaking
Language and literacy
Verbal art and performance
Bilingualism and code-switching
Language globalization
Intercultural communication
Language socialization

*Conference Details:

The conference will take place from Oct 5 - Oct 7, 2007. Our confirmed plenary speakers are Mary Bucholtz (Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara), Kathy Escamilla (Education, University of Colorado), Norma Mendoza-Denton (Anthropology, University of Arizona), and Crispin Thurlow (Communication, University of Washington). The Friday of the conference will consist of workshops held by plenary speakers and CLASP faculty, while Saturday and Sunday will be devoted to paper presentations and plenary talks.  The conference website can be found at: http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/kira_hall/clasp/conf/

*Theme Session
Papers for the Theme Session should focus on a topic or issue dealing with interdisciplinary approaches to doing research on language, society and culture. Papers for consideration in the Theme Session may address issues dealing with crossing (inter)discipinary boundaries in both theoretical and applied research. Possible topics for the Theme Session might include: dialogues between linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics; the use of feminist and queer conversation analysis; ethnographic approaches to doing critical discourse analysis; etc.

*Submission Guidelines
Please email a 500 word abstract to [email protected] by April 15, 2007. The abstract should be attached in Microsoft Word (.doc) or Rich Text (.rtf) format and should contain NO information identifying the author(s) of the paper. Abstracts are evaluated on an anonymous basis. In the body of the email, please include the following information:

-Name(s) of author(s)
-University or other affiliation(s) of the author(s)
-Email address(es) of the author(s)
-Title of proposed paper
-Whether you'd like to be considered for the General or Themed session
-Equipment requirements
-Any additional comments
-3-5 keywords describing the paper

Notification of acceptance or non-acceptance will be sent via email by August 1, 2007.

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Posted by prolurkr at 12:08 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research

CALL FOR PAPERS:  Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Narrative Research (2/15/07;
6/25/07-6/26/07)

Papers are invited for the Inaugural Symposium of the Center for Narrative Research at Wuppertal University, Germany, 25-26 June, 2007.  The significance of narrative as a cognitive and communicative tool used to make sense of the world by creating personal and cultural identities or relating the present to the past and future is increasingly recognized in a variety of disciplines, ranging from literary studies and linguistics to anthropology, sociology, psychology, historiography and business studies, to name but a few. The growing interdisciplinary interest in narrative and storytelling, however, has so far not led to a convergence of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches: Far from developing a 'lingua franca' for interdisciplinary discussions of narrative, the numerous studies of stories and storytelling in recent years seem to have contributed to a 'Babelisation' of narrative studies. This situation raises a number of questions which the contributions to the symposium will explore:

- What are the differences or similarities between (the analysis of) non-fictional and fictional storytelling?
- To what degree have the various disciplinary approaches to narrative acknowledged each other's findings? Do they proceed from the same premises?
- Can the terminology developed by narratological approaches to fiction serve as the basis for an interdisciplinary lingua franca in narrative research? Or is fictional narrative significantly different from non-fictional story-telling?
- How can (literary) narratology benefit from concepts and methods proposed by narrative researchers in other disciplines? Might the insights of narrative psychology, for instance, help to further shape the approach known as 'cognitive narratology'?
- Can 'narrative' and 'storytelling' function as 'travelling concepts' (Mieke Bal), facilitating interdisciplinary communication?
- Is there any common ground between hermeneutic, narratological and empirical methods of describing, analysing and interpreting narrative(s)?

We welcome contributions both from literary scholars and from narrative researchers in other disciplines. There will be keynote lectures by David Herman (Project Narrative, Ohio State University) and Bo Pettersson (Department of English, University of Helsinki). Please submit proposals for a 20-minute paper to Roy Sommer at [email protected] by February 15, 2007. Proposals should include both an abstract (150-250 words) and a short biographical note. All submissions will be considered for a prospective volume on the topic.

Prof. Dr. Roy Sommer
University of Wuppertal
English and American Studies
Gaussstrasse 20
D-42119 Wuppertal
Germany
E-mail: [email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 06:54 PM | TrackBack

CFP - The Spirit of the Age: Debating the Past, Present and Future of Life Writing

The Spirit of the Age:
Debating the Past, Present and Future of Life Writing

4-6 July 2007, Kingston University

Call for Papers

Speakers to include: Neal Ascherson, John Fuegi, Victoria Glendinning, Kathryn Hughes, Hanif Kureishi, Laura Marcus, Blake Morrison, Hilary Spurling, Claire Tomalin and Francis Wheen.

This, the first international interdisciplinary Conference on the Writing of Lives to be hosted jointly by the new Life Narratives Research Centre and the Faculties of Art and Social Science, and Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, aims to invite debate across these disciplines on the particular issues that have surrounded
the writing of lives in the past, and to foster discussion on the challenges and opportunities facing such endeavours today and tomorrow.

Hegel famously suggested, "the great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualises his age". The Spirit of the Age conference is seeking to bring about interdisciplinary discussions and debates around the notion of Hegel's model of the making of an age by calling for papers from academics and practitioners working on life writing in any area of the arts or the academy on the topics listed below.

* Life Writing that defines an Age
* Marginal Lives and Historical Revision
* Witness/Survivor Memoirs
* Writing Lives in the Arts
* The Author as Subject: Writing Literary Lives
* Group Work: Writing on Multiple Subjects
* Writing Political Lives
* Short Lives/The Obituary
* Objects as Subjects: Writing Lives of the Material World

Proposals for panels, papers, workshops, round tables, film and interview presentations by practitioners and researchers should be submitted as abstracts of up to 300 words by Thursday 1st March 2007 to:

Penny Tribe,
'Spirit of the Age' Abstracts Administrator,
Kingston University,
Faculty of Art and Social Sciences
Penrhyn Road Kingston
KT1 2EE
Tel: +44 (0)208 547 2000
Email: [email protected]

Conference Organisers: Dr Meg Jensen, Dr Jane Jordan and Professor Brian Brivati

http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/conferences/spirit_of_the_age/

Posted by prolurkr at 03:17 PM | TrackBack

CFP - media in transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

April 27-29, 2007
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

These and related cultural practices have generated heated contention and debate. What constitutes fair use of another's intellectual property? What ethical issues are posed when sounds, images, and stories move from one culture or subculture to another? Or when materials created by a community or religious or ethnic tradition are appropriated by technologically powerful outsiders? What constitutes creativity and originality in expressive formats based on sampling and remixing? What obligations do artists owe to those who have inspired and informed their work and how much creative freedom should they exercise over their borrowed or shared materials?

One source of answers to such questions lies in the past - in the ways in which traditional printed texts - and films and TV shows as well - invoke, allude to and define themselves against their rivals and ancestors; and - perhaps even more saliently - in the ways in which folk and popular cultures may nourish and reward not originality in our modern sense, but familiarity, repetition, borrowing, collaboration.

This fifth Media in Transition conference, then, aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices. We hope this event will appeal widely across disciplines and scholarly and professional boundaries.  For example, we hope this conference will bring together such figures as:

* anthropologists of oral and folk cultures
* historians of the book and reading publics
* political scientists and legal scholars interested in alternative approaches to intellectual property
* media educators who aim to help students think about their ethical responsibilities in this new participatory culture
* artists ready to discuss appropriation and collaboration in their own work
* economists and business leaders interested in the new relationships that are emerging between media producers and consumers
* activists and netizens interested in the ways new technologies democratize who has the right to be an author

Among topics the conference might explore:

* history of authorship and copyright
* folk practices in traditional and contemporary society
* appropriating materials from other cultures: political and ethical dilemmas
* poetics and politics of fan culture
* blogging, podcasting, and collective intelligence
* media literacy and the ethics of participatory culture
* artistic collaboration and cultural production, past and present
* fair use and intellectual property
* sampling and remixing in popular music
* cultural production in traditional and developing societies
* Web 2.0 and the "architecture of participation"
* creative industries and user-generated content
* parody, spoofs, and mash-ups as critical commentary
* game mods and machinima
* the workings of genre in different media systems
* law and technological change

Short abstracts of no more than 200 words for papers or panels should be sent via email to Brad Seawell at [email protected] no later than January 5, 2007. Brad can be reached by phone at 617-253-3521. Email submissions are preferred, but abstracts can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
14N-430
MIT
Cambridge , MA 02139

Posted by prolurkr at 12:16 PM | TrackBack

THE ILLINOIS QUALITATIVE DISSERTATION AWARD

The International Center for Qualitative Inquiry is pleased to announce the second annual Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award, for excellence in qualitative research in a doctoral dissertation. Eligible dissertations will use and advance qualitative methods to investigate any topic. Applications for the award will be judged by the following criteria: clarity of writing; willingness to experiment with new and traditional writing forms; advocacy, promotion, development, and use of qualitative research methodologies and practices in new fields of study, and in policy arenas involving issues of social justice.

There are two award categories, traditional (Category A), and experimental (Category B). Submissions in both categories address social justice issues.  Submissions in Category A use traditional qualitative research and writing forms, while Category B submissions experiment with traditional writing and representational forms.

An award of USD $250 plus a book credit of USD $150, courtesy of Sage Publications,  will be given to each winner. All doctoral candidates are eligible, provided they have successfully defended their proposals prior to January 1, 2007, and will defend their final dissertation by April 1, 2007.  Receiving or being considered for other awards does not preclude a student from applying for this award. Applications are due Febuary 1, 2007. The 2007 award will be made at the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry meeting in May, 2007. This will be an annual award.

Applicants should submit four (4) copies of the following:

*  A letter indicating interest in the award that includes the applicant's name, address, university, telephone number(s), e-mail address, department, date of dissertation proposal defense, and current status of the dissertation.
*  A letter from the applicant's dissertation advisor/chair recommending the applicant's work for the award and verifying the date of the dissertation proposal defense.
*  A research description of no more than five (5) double-spaced pages:  approximately two pages of introduction and theory, two pages on the methodology, and one page on the significance of the work. Finalists may be asked to submit their full proposal or additional information at a later date.
*  One chapter and a table of contents from the dissertation.
*  Finalists may be asked to submit their full dissertation after the first round of adjudication, closer to the competition closing date.

Applications are now being accepted. Submissions should be sent to:

Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award Committee
The Center for Qualitative Inquiry
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Gregory Hall, Rm 103 (mc-462)
810 South Wright St.
Urbana , IL 61801

For further information, please visit http://www.qi2007.org, or http://www.c4qi.org/award.html. Direct all emails to [email protected]

DEADLINE: February 1, 2007

Posted by prolurkr at 07:40 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Methods of blog research: Behind the scenes - possible panel(s) for AoIR 2007

As the number of studies on blogs has increased, so have the questions and issues surrounding how one does research on these multi-faceted online sites. Experienced researchers and novices grapple with multiple issues as they adapt, modify and develop various research methods. How does one identify blogs for one's study? What sampling procedures work best? What software is to be used in blog research? What are the benefits and weaknesses of using particular methods?

We call for abstracts and papers that address these issues for a panel or series of panels, at the AoIR Conference 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In particular we are interested in presentations that look at methods - qualitative or quantitative - and the difficulties researchers encounter as they do or have done research on blogs. Our focus is not on results; rather we are looking for colleagues interested in sharing knowledge and discussing challenges of the "nuts and bolts" of blog research.

The list of methods to consider includes but is not limited to:
-- Content Analysis
-- Ethnography
-- Social Network Analysis
-- Interviews and surveys
-- Narratives and biographies
-- Discourse analysis

Interested parties should submit 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation by December 15, 2006 to the organizers:

Lois Ann Scheidt and Inna Kouper
Doctoral Students
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University
lscheidt at indiana dot edu
inkouper at indiana dot edu

Posted by prolurkr at 07:44 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Special Issue on Virtual Ethnography

Forum Qualitative Social Research (FQS, http://www.qualitative-research.net) is preparing an Special Issue on Virtual Ethnography.

All the details here:
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-e/CfP_07-3-e.htm

Important dates:

- 15 february 2007: Deadline for submission of papers

- 15 april 2007: Deadline for paper reviews. Information about the results of the selection process

- September 2007: Publication of the FQS Special Issue: Virtual Ethnography

1. Introduction

This special issue aims to gather different scientific work that deal with some of the theoretical, empirical and methodological topics currently faced by virtual ethnography.

Ethnography is a fundamental methodology in social and cultural research.  Ethnography allows the researcher to reconstruct the meanings and materials that shape the cultural collectives he or she analyzes. Ethnography is also a qualitative approach in social and cultural studies of the Internet and digital technologies such as mobile phones, videogames, etc. Though it has been used for more than a decade for studying Internet phenomena, there still remain many methodological difficulties when developing ethnographies on/of/through the Internet.

This special FQS issue will contribute to the current debate that ethnography faces when the Internet and digital technologies are a fundamental part of its object of study and fieldwork.

The main topics of interest are 1. the alteration of both the epistemology and interpretation frameworks and 2. methodological, empirical and theoretical challenges raised by the ethnographies on/of/through the Internet.

Methodological, theoretical and empirical papers will be accepted. We are especially interested in studies that address the following topics:

* Fieldwork construction: How do ethnographers develop their notion of "field" in ethnographies of the Internet?

* How does the virtual/digital change the epistemological framework for ethnography?

* What is the role of the ethnographer's experience with technologies, and how can it be managed in the research process?

* How should technological artefacts (software and digital devices) be treated in virtual ethnographies?

* Is it necessary to introduce the material dimension and not only the symbolic issues of technical artefacts in virtual ethnographies

* How handles ethnography the observation of communicative activities supported by digital technologies?

2. Submission

* Papers must be sent to Daniel Domínguez ([email protected]) or Adolfo Estalella ([email protected]).

* Papers for review. Abstracts could be presented for review at least in the English language, additionally in German and Spanish, as far as available.  Full papers should be presented in English, German or Spanish.

* Original texts only. Papers should be original and unpublished.

* Format. The electronic format allows FQS to include long papers and different options for linking data and interpretation. Please contact the editors for further information about innovative presentation formats.

* Peer Review. Contributions will be reviewed directly by the editors of the special issue (open peer review); if necessary, the FQS editors will draw on external reviewers.

* General publication guidelines. Before sending in your contribution, please ensure that FQS guidelines for submissions are followed, see http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-e/manuskript-e.htm. Please also
take a look at contributions published so far in FQS, see
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-e/rubriken-e.htm.

3. Additional Information

More information about the publishing process, see
http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs/fqs-e/publishing-e.htm.

For any questions or suggestions, please feel free to send an e-mail to any of the editors: Daniel Domínguez, Anne Beaulieu, Adolfo Estalella, Edgar Gómez, Rosie Read and Bernt Schnettler.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:00 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Auditory Internet Cultures/ Podcasting

Posted by prolurkr at 04:26 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture

Transformations is seeking abstracts for the following issue:

Walter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture

What does Walter Benjamin offer for critical thinking and creative practice in an age increasingly mediated by virtual technologies?

Much Benjaminian scholarship proposes a Benjamin at best ambivalent to, and at worst, in recoil from modernity. Yet, recent critical thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy provide new possibilities in approaching the analysis of contemporary culture inspired by Benjamin's insights and arguments. These suggest innovative ways of reading and incorporating Benjamin, ways that re-engage an active configuration between politics, art, and representation in response to the shift from mass to global culture.

Increasingly it seems possible to reconsider the role art can, and may be already playing, in such a configuration. This issue of Transformations seeks submissions that address these ideas. In the light of Benjamin's thought, and those who take that thought further, we want to look at what the concept of virtuality- the tendency in mediated contexts towards disembodied interactions and ways of being human-- does to Benjamin's ideas of politics, art, and media?

Call for abstracts: abstracts of 500 words due end of November 2006

Papers due: March 2007

Publication: mid 2007

Submissions: Submissions should be sent to the
Issue editor: John Grech, at
[email protected]
Or alternatively, to the
General editor: Warwick Mules at
[email protected]

For full details please visit the Transformations website at
<http://transformations.cqu.edu.au>http://transformations.cqu.edu.au

Posted by prolurkr at 08:51 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Third International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

We are delighted invite you to submit paper and panel proposals for the Third International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry at http://www.qi2007.org. Please just follow the link at our frontpage and make your submissions at http://www.qi2007.org/submission.html

Please note that you would be able to submit a paper as in a poster session.  An unmoderated poster session is tentatively scheduled to be organized at one of our conference venues. No full text deposit and/or registration is required at this time. The online submission will end on December 1 2006. On this date, you will also be able to register for workshops and conference sessions at qi2007.org

We are updating our website constantly with information on conference sessions, workshops, and travel information. You are also encouraged to discuss your work, submissions and other travel information at our community http://qi2007.org/community. Please direct all inquiries at [email protected].

Thank you. We look forward to seeing you in QI2007.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:50 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award 2007

The Carl Couch Center (http://www.cccsir.org/)  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. Evaluation will be administered by a Review Committee of four:

        Dr. Mark D. Johns, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa
        Dr. Katherine M. Clegg Smith, Johns Hopkins University
        Dr. Lori Kendall, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
        Dr. Dennis Waskul, Minnesota State University, Mankato

Competition is open to graduate or undergraduate students of all disciplines. Works that are published or accepted for publication are not eligible for award consideration. Entries should not exceed 30 pages (approximately 7500 words) in length, including references and appendices. Limit of one entry per student per year.

The top three papers will receive Couch Awards to be presented at the 2007 meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (aoir.org) in Vancouver, BC. The top paper will be awarded a certificate and a cash
prize of $300 US, runner up will receive a certificate and a cash prize of $200 US, and a third paper will receive a certificate and a cash prize of $100 US. All three authors will be invited to present their work at a session of the AoIR conference, October 18-20, 2007.

Those interested should send a copy of their paper, with a 100-word abstract, electronically to Mark D. Johns at [email protected] . Application deadline is April 30, 2007. Notification of award will be sent by June 15.

Those with questions or comments about Couch Award application, please contact:

Mark D. Johns
Dept. of Communication Studies
Luther College, Decorah, IA 52101
E-mail: [email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 01:02 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Computer Culture Area, 2007 Southwest/Texas Popular Culture

Computer Culture Area,
Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Meeting
Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 14-17, 2007
http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/

We are seeking paper and panel proposals on a wide range of blog-related topics, including blogging and pedagogy; blogging and political campaigns; blogging and the news media; and personal blogs. A paper may analyze an existing blog or assess the value or usefulness of blogs for particular purposes. We are especially interested in the relationship and conflict between blog culture and the mainstream news media, and the ways in which the media have represented blogging.

For Paper Proposals:

Please submit a brief abstract embedded in the body of an email.  Include contact information (your postal and preferred email address, phone and fax numbers, etc.) and a biographical note about your connection to the topic.

For Panel and Other Proposals, such as Performances:

Feel free to query first.  Panel, roundtable, and other proposals should include all of the information requested for individual paper proposals, as well as a 100-word statement of the panel's rationale and any noteworthy organizational features.

Proposals are welcome from any and all scholars, including graduate students, independent scholars, and tenured, tenure-track, and emeritus faculty.  Also, unusual formats, technologies, and the like are
encouraged.

Professor Joseph Chaney
jchaney_at_iusb.edu
Department of English
Indiana University South Bend
South Bend IN 46634-7111

Posted by prolurkr at 02:36 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Biography Area: Popular Culture Association

Annual NationalPopular Culture/American Culture Associations Conference
Boston, Massachusetts
4-7 April 2007

Boston Marriott Copley Place
110 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02116

Biography Area: Popular Culture Association

UPDATED Deadline for proposal submissions is:  3 November 2006. http://www.popularculture.org

The Biography section of the Popular Culture Association announces a call for papers on Biography and Popular Culture. Panels run 90 minutes; each panelist has 20 minutes for presentation with questions and answers.  Proposals must not be more than one page, include a one page curriculum vitae, make sure to include name, mailing address, institutional affiliation, phone number, and email address.

Do not send proposals via electronic mail. Send a paper copy of proposals to:

Jean-Paul Benowitz
ACA Local Culture of Boston, Chair
Elizabethtown College
Department of History
1 Alpha Drive
Elizabethtown, PA 17022

Posted by prolurkr at 07:13 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media (MCLLM)

The Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media (MCLLM) is hosting its annual conference on March 30 and 31, 2007.   The conference will be held at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois.  We would like to solicit proposals for 20 minute papers from scholars at all career stages, from beginning graduate students to established and senior scholars.

The confirmed keynote speaker for this year's conference is Toril Moi, James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, author of *Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory* (1985)*,** Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman *(1994), and* What Is a Woman? And Other Essays* (1999)*. * Her latest book, *Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy *, will be published in September 2006.

MCLLM invites papers on all areas of literary, language, and media studies, ranging from Medieval and Renaissance studies to popular culture and technology studies.   We especially welcome proposals for papers that innovatively treat the study of feminist theory and women's writing, the interconnections between literature and philosophy, and 19 th and 20thcentury European literature.  Individual or panel (3-4 people) proposals are welcome.

The deadline for submissions is December 1st, 2006.  Please include a cover page with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and email address.  Accepted contributors will be notified via email by January 1st, 2007.

Please submit your 250-word (1 page) abstracts as an attachment to:

[email protected]

Additional information can be found at the conference website http://www.engl.niu.edu/mcllm/.  Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding the conference.

Cortney Barko, Angela Grimaldi, and Kathleen Turner
Co-Chairs, MCLLM 2007
Department of English
Northern Illinois University
[email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 06:47 PM | TrackBack

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

 Recent years have seen a flourishing of social media - the promise of the WWW coming to fruition. Across the world, individuals can share opinions, experiences and expertise at the push of a button. There has been a fundamental shift thanks to significant advances in the ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has been torn down.

Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in recent years is the blogosphere. Tens of thousands of new blogs are created every day; blog content is becoming ubiquitous, surfacing in news portals, search results and corporate public relations. Even those who are unaware of the blogosphere are still influenced by its content. Although blogs are highly visible currently, other forms of conversational spaces continue to flourish, especially message boards, mailing lists, review sites and Usenet.

Social media covers all forms of sharing: from photos, to videos, to recommendations. In the past few years, many examples of social media have become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo sharing site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone for sharing recommendations of websites; Web 2.0 applications in general abound with newcomers in the social media space.

One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the drive from within to study the ecology as it evolves. People act at once as creators, observers and influencers of the space in which they participate. At the same time, businesses are quickly grasping the potential benefit to attending to the new space of social media.  Monitoring the aggregate trends and opinions revealed by social media provides valuable insight to a number of business applications:  marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence.

The fast growing blogosphere and social media space is a fruitful area for investigations across many disciplines. For example:

•  Natural language processing and machine learning researchers study the extraction of factual information from text; can blogs be processed in a robust manner and can knowledge bases be populated with facts from blogs?
• Social network researchers and graph theory researchers are concerned with inferring community structure; analyzing the linkage patterns among blog entries can provide explicit community structure; can we infer implicit communities through the content of the blogs?
• Political scientists are looking at ways of identifying influencers in a community; who are the influential bloggers whose voice is echoed by others?
• Multimedia researchers are attempting to categorize audio and video content, aggregate information from diverse sources (textual, audio, video); can visual & audio social media be stored in a way that allows search across different modalities?
• Market analysis researchers are concerned with what people think of the products and services of a company; can we process blogs automatically and find consumer complaints and breaking reports about vulnerabilities of products; also when does a burst of blogging activity become a trend?
• Social psychologists study the response to current events, including emotional and attitudinal dimensions as well as content and patterns of influence.

Despite the growing relevance of blogs and social media, existing research has only begun to address the spectrum of issues that arise in their analysis. Blogs, for example, are a different kind of document than the relatively clean text that NLP research is based on. Such differences in term of structure, content and grammaticality will be a challenge considering that blogs will likely represent the most common way of publicly accessible personal expression.

Areas of interest
The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research in the following areas:

1. AI methods for ethnographic analysis through social media.
2. Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.
3. Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
4. Crawling/spidering and indexing. 
5. Human Computer Interaction; social media tools; navigation. 
6. Multimedia; audio/visual processing; aggregating information from different modalities. 
7. Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization. 
8. Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management. 
9. Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction. 
10. Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering. 
11. Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering. 
12. Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media. 
13. Trend identification/tracking. 
14. Visualization, aggregation and filtering. 
15. New social media applications, interfaces, interaction techniques.

Important dates
Submissions:        December 8, 2006
Acceptance Notifications:        February 2, 2007
Camera Ready Copies:        February 16, 2007
Tutorials:        March 25, 2007
Conference:        March 26-28, 2007

Submission
People interested in participating should submit through the conference website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), a short paper (up to 4 pages), a poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by midnight (PST) of Dec 8, 2006. Each submission should, to the extent possible, indicate a list of relevant areas from the list above (e.g., 03, 04, 10).

Posted by prolurkr at 09:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - Internet Research

(1)  The Online Social World as a living Laboratory?
Call for paper or presentation proposals regarding this proposition.  Does the online world sufficiently mirror the physical world such that social science, cultural studies, communications, political science, economics and related disciplines could study (or have studied) online behaviors to theorize, predict, or confirm offline, real world behaviors and outcomes. Student papers are especially welcomed.

(2) Suggested Chapters for a Comprehensive Handbook of e-Research for studying online/Internet or using online tools for research?  Call for paper or presentation proposals regarding this topic.  Methodology and "How to ." presentations welcomed about research methods, software, and scholarly writing.  Student papers are especially welcomed.

April 4 - 7, 2007
North Central Sociological Association & Midwest Sociological Society Joint Meeting
Chicago Downtown Marriott
http://www.ncsanet.org/Jointtheme.pdf.

PROPOSAL DEADLINE: October 31, 2006
Organizer: Robin Y. Mabry-Hubbard
University of Missouri-Columbia
101 Gentry Hall
Columbia, MO  65211
Phone: 573-268-0583    FAX: 573-884-4444
E-mail:  [email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 08:13 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Gender & Technology Plenary Session

Call for Papers: Gender & Technology Plenary Session
2007 Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association
The 28th Annual Meeting of the SW/TX PCA/ACA
February 14-17, 2007
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico

The 2007 SW/TX PCA/ACA Conference will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the Hyatt Regency downtown. Further details regarding the conference (listing of all areas, hotel, registration, tours, etc.) can be found at http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/.

Proposals are now being accepted for the Gender & Technology Plenary Session, which will focus on the various relationships that exist between gender and technology. Listed below are some suggestions for possible presentations, but topics not included here are also welcome.

·      gender and technology in learning environments
·      gender in IT careers
·      medical regulation, invention, and augmentation of gender
·      gender and science theory (dealing with philosophical questions/aspects, i.e. Keller, Longino, etc.)
·      gender role-playing on the web
·      gender differences in human-computer interaction
·      media portrayal of women and men interacting with technology
·      feminine, masculine, and gender-neutral technology

Inquiries regarding this area and/or abstracts of 250 words may be sent to Brian Still at [email protected] by December 1, 2006.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:33 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Narrative Conference

Narrative Conference
March 15-18, 2007
Washington, D.C.

For a proposed panel at the 2007 Narrative Conference, I am seeking papers that explore situations in which the strict distinction between narrator and author begins to blur. What are the conditions for and significances of such moments?

Proposals should include 1) a 300-word abstract, 2) a brief vitae (for panel proposal purposes). Please send proposals (in the body of email or as Microsoft Word attachment) to Sue Kim at [email protected] by October 1, 2006.

See the conference's official website for additional information:
http://narrative.georgetown.edu/conference2007/callforpapers.html

Posted by prolurkr at 10:28 PM | TrackBack

CFP - ACM CHIMIT 2007

 ACM CHIMIT '07: 1st ACM Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction for
                Management of Information Technology

               March 30-31, 2007 - Cambridge, MA, USA
                   http://chimit.cs.tufts.edu


Over the years, IT systems have become increasingly complex such that management is now a serious bottleneck to personal and organizational productivity. IT service delivery costs are now dominated by operating expenses, and end-user productivity suffers as a consequence. Simply put, we are at a turning point in IT: Further advances in technology, business efficiency, and growth require fundamentally new approaches to system design and management. Solutions will require a broad understanding of technology, people, organizations, and business. This symposium aims to bring together stakeholders, researchers,
practitioners, and designers from diverse fields such as human-computer interaction, human factors, computer science, management science, social sciences, and service sciences, to identify issues, put forward a research agenda, and propose solutions.

TOPICS
Original contributions are sought broadly on workplace studies, processes and practices, organizational knowledge, models and metrics, design, experimental studies, tools, and automation approaches for IT
management. More specifically topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Workspace Studies
  - Ethnographic studies of IT work in context
  - Patterns of work for various IT processes
  - Requirements for the design of new technologies
  - Issues related to new technology adoption
  - Role and forms of organization for effective work

* Processes and Practices
  - Development and use of processes in IT
  - Best practices in problem solving strategies
  - Impact of business decisions on IT
  - Standards and guidelines of IT management
  - Experiences in policy development and use

* Organizational Knowledge
  - Case studies and techniques for expertise-finding
  - Approaches to supporting communities of practice
  - Relationship computing and role management
  - Studies of collaboration and coordination
  - Knowledge management and training in IT

* Models and Metrics
  - Models and metrics of key performance indicators
  - Quality analysis of models and metrics
  - Techniques for dynamic data collection
  - Development of early problem indicators

* Design
  - Design of human-centered IT systems
  - Architectural considerations for user experience
  - Design methodologies for complexity and risk

* Experimental Studies
  - Models of interaction with complex IT systems
  - Language in human-machine interaction
  - Evaluations of system management interfaces
  - Experiments on human error and attention
  - Cognitive issues in complex display design
  - Studies of decision-making for complex problems

* Tools and Techniques
  - Interaction techniques for system management
  - Collaborative system administration workspaces
  - Visualizations of complex system behavior
  - Management tools for personal computing
  - Script and tool development environments

* Automation
  - Automation/Policy languages
  - Human interfaces to automation
  - Policy-based interaction and control
  - Trust management in automation
  - Human-automation work division and redundancy
  - Agent-based automation and control

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Papers must be in standard ACM two-column format and cannot exceed 10 pages in total length, including the abstract, figures and references, and must be formatted according to the detailed ACM SIG publication
instructions. Posters must be in standard ACM two-column format and cannot exceed 2 pages in total length. Please visit the CHIMIT '07 web site for further information.

IMPORTANT DATES
September 1, 2006: Papers Submission
October 13, 2006: Papers Notification
October 27, 2006: Posters Submission
November 17, 2006: Posters Notification

GENERAL CHAIRS                              PROGRAM CHAIRS
Alva Couch, Tufts                           Patricia Jones, NASA Ames
Paul Maglio, IBM                            Eser Kandogan, IBM

                          STEERING COMMITTEE
John Bailey, IBM                            Tom Sheridan, MIT
Stephen Barley, Stanford                    Ben Shneiderman, Maryland
AEleen Frisch, Exponential                  Tony Temple, IBM
David Woods, Ohio State

                          PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Ismail Ari, HP Labs                         Paul Luff, Kings College London
Jim Barlow, NCSA                            Wayne Lutters, Maryland, BC
David Blank-Edelman, Northeastern           David Kaber, North Carolina State
Jeannette Blomberg, IBM                     Emre Kiciman, Microsoft
Geoff Bowker, Santa Clara                   Rob Kolstadt
Mark Burgess, University College Oslo       Luke Kowalski, Oracle
Terrel Cox, Microsoft                       Hanan Lutfiyya, Western Ontario
Catalina Danis, IBM                         Gloria Mark, UC, Irvine
Mica Endsley, SA Technologies               Mustapha Mouloua, UCF
Christine Halverson, IBM                    Susan Leigh Star, Santa Clara
Pam Hinds, Stanford                         Jim Thornton, PARC
Erik Hollnagel, École des Mines de Paris

TREASURER                                   REGISTRATION CHAIR
Asaf Degani, NASA Ames                      Chris Campbell, IBM

PUBLICITY
Jim Thornton, PARC

Posted by prolurkr at 01:29 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Webology: Sociology of the Web

Webology: Sociology of the Web

Background and Significance
The World Wide Web is a global force affecting socio-cultural changes worldwide. These changes are affecting cultural diversity and difference throughout the world. The purpose of this Special Issue is to identify sociological issues (aspects of race, ethnic/national origin, language, religion, class, color, gender and other sociological issues) that exist on, and because of, the World Wide Web.

Contributions to this Special Issue (Volume 3, Number 4) should address either sociology of the Web as it is relates to users' context, or socio-cultural and socio-political issues of the Web as it relates to the world society. More broadly, papers are solicited on, but not limited to, the following topics:
     - Web sociology
     - Socio-cultural impacts of the Web and the impact of the Web on social interaction
     - Socio-political impacts of the Web
     - Web users' behavior
     - Web users and usage studies
     - Web and civil society
     - Web and globalization
     - Web and Digital Divide
     - Web accessibility in developing countries
     - Web and Open Access
     - The role of the Web and ICT in research, education, economy, social development
     - Censorship and Website filtering
     - Intellectual freedom on the Web
     - International issues of the Web
     - Evaluating Web resources
     - Wikipedia and its Implications

The topics above are not a comprehensive list of all possible topics for this Special Issue. Submissions to this Special Issue should address the topics above (as well as other related topics).

Guest Editor of the Special Issue
      Dr. William Bostock
      School of Government
      University of Tasmania
      Australia
      bostock at utas.edu.au
      www.utas.edu.au

Submissions
Submissions should follow the Author Guidelines of Webology. All Submissions will be acknowledged and then refereed by at least 2 peer reviewers. Authors should indicate that the submission is intended for
the Special Issue on Sociology of the Web, in the accompanying cover letter.

All submissions must be in English, and should represent the original work of the authors.  Improved versions of papers previously published in conference proceedings are welcome, provided that no copyright limitations exist. Submissions must be made electronically via e-mail to the Guest Editor (sending a CC: copy to the alternative e-mail address). The manuscript should be included as an attachment in MS-Word.

E-mail address for submission:
      TO: bostock at utas.edu.au
Alternative e-mail address for submission:
      CC: nouruzi at gmail.com

Important Dates:
      October 10, 2006: Deadline for submission of papers. All submissions are due to the Guest Editor.
      November 30, 2006: Notification to authors.
      December 15, 2006: Special Issue is published.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:42 PM | TrackBack

CFP - THE FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING of the CULTURAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION

THE FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING of the CULTURAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION (U.S.)
Portland, Oregon (Portland State University) April 19-21, 2007
 
The Cultural Studies Association (U.S.) invites participation in its Fifth Annual Meeting from all areas and on all topics of relevance to Cultural Studies, including but not limited to literature, history, sociology,
geography, anthropology, communications, popular culture, cultural theory, queer studies, critical race studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies, media and film studies, material culture studies, performance and visual arts studies.
 
The conference this year will feature plenary sessions on Ethics and Environment; Asia, The Pacific Rim, and Capitalism; and Post-9/11 America and the World.  Plenarists will include:

Jill Casid, Art History, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Eric Cazdyn, East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
Katharyne Mitchell, Geography, University of Washington
David Palumbo-Liu, Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Paul Smith, Cultural Studies, George Mason University
Andrew Ross, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

All participants in the Fifth Annual meeting must pay registration fees by March 15, 2007, to be listed and participate in the program.  See the registration page of the CSA conference website for details about fees at http://www.csaus.pitt.edu/conf/index.php?cf=4. 
 
If you have any questions about procedures for submission or other concerns, please e-mail us at: [email protected].
 
We welcome proposals in the following four categories:
 
1. INDIVIDUAL PAPERS
Proposals for individual papers are due October 16, 2006. 
 
Successful papers will reach several constituencies of the organization and will connect analysis to social, political, economic, or ethical questions.
 
They should be submitted at http://www.csaus.pitt.edu/conf/submit.php?cf=4.  Successful submission will be acknowledged.  If you do not receive an acknowledgement within 24 hours, please resubmit. The acknowledgement will say that your proposal has been "successfully submitted," which does NOT
mean your proposal has been accepted.
 
All paper proposals require:
 
a. The name, email address, department and institutional affiliation of the author, entered on the website.
b. A 500-word abstract for the 20-minute paper entered on the website.
c. Any needed audio-visual equipment must be noted following the abstract in that space on the site.
 
2. PRE-CONSTITUTED PAPER SESSIONS, ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS, OR WORKSHOP SESSIONS
Proposals for pre-constituted sessions are due October 16, 2006. 
 
Roundtables are sessions in which panelists offer brief remarks, but the bulk of the session is devoted to discussion among the panelists and audience members. Workshops are similarly devoted primarily to discussion, but they focus on practical problems in such areas as teaching, research, or activism. No paper titles may be included for roundtables or workshops.
 
Pre-constituted sessions should NOT be submitted on the website, but should be sent to [email protected] with the words "Session Proposal" in the subject line. All proposals will be acknowledged, but please allow at least two business days before inquiring.
 
All session proposals require:
 
a. The name, email address, phone number, and department and institutional affiliation of the proposer.
b. The names, email addresses, and department and institutional affiliations of each participant.
c. A 500-word overview of the session, including identifying the type of session (panel, roundtable, workshop) proposed.  For paper sessions, also include 500-word abstracts of each of the papers.  Paper sessions should have three or four papers.
d. A request for any needed audio-visual equipment.  All AV equipment must be requested with the proposal.
 
3.  DIVISION SESSIONS
Proposals for division sessions are due October 16, 2006.
 
CSA is initiating a new format for the conference:  divisions, which are thematic groupings of sessions, organized by division leaders.  Division leaders will organize two to three sessions for the conference.  These
division sessions will be marked in the conference program.   Lists of divisions and procedures for submission to divisions are at http://www.csaus.pitt.edu.   (See link in the bottom paragraph.)
 
4. SEMINAR SESSIONS
Proposals for seminars are due October 16, 2006.
 
The conference will again feature a series of seminars. Seminars are small-group (maximum 15 individuals) discussion sessions for which participants write brief "position papers" that are circulated prior to the
conference. Those wishing to lead seminars are encouraged to submit a proposal.  Once seminar leaders are chosen, the seminars will be announced through the CSA's various public e-mail lists on November 1.  Participants will contact the seminar leader directly who will then inform the Program Committee who will participate in the seminar after November 20.

Seminar proposals should be sent to:  May Joseph, Assoc. Prof. Global
Studies, Pratt Institute
[email protected]. 

All seminar proposals require:
 
a. A 500-word overview of the topic designed to attract participants and clear instructions about how the seminar will work.
b. The name, email address, phone number, mailing address, and departmental and institutional affiliation of the leader(s) proposing the seminar.
c. A brief bio or one page CV of the leader proposing the seminar.
d. A request for any needed audio-visual equipment.  All AV equipment must be requested with the proposal. Since seminars typically involve discussion of previously circulated papers, such requests must be explained.
 
Those interested in participating in (rather than leading) a seminar should consult the list of seminars and the instructions for signing up for them, available on November 1 at http://www.csaus.pitt.edu/conf/index.php?cf=4. 

Posted by prolurkr at 02:10 PM | TrackBack

CFP - MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age 
an international conference
April 27-29, 2007
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Online: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are
actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities.  Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are
rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are sampling and remixing sounds.

These and related cultural practices have generated heated contention and debate. What constitutes fair use of another's intellectual property?  What ethical issues are posed when sounds, images, and stories move from one culture or subculture to another? Or when materials created by a community or religious or ethnic tradition are appropriated by technologically powerful outsiders? What constitutes creativity and originality in expressive formats based on sampling and remixing? What obligations do artists owe to those who have inspired and informed their work and how much creative freedom should they exercise over their borrowed or shared materials?

One source of answers to such questions lies in the past -- in the ways in which traditional printed texts -- and films and TV shows as well -- invoke, allude to and define themselves against their rivals and
ancestors; and -- perhaps even more saliently -- in the ways in which folk and popular cultures may nourish and reward not originality in our modern sense, but familiarity, repetition, borrowing, collaboration.

This fifth Media in Transition conference, then, aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices. We hope this event will appeal widely 
across disciplines and scholarly and professional boundaries. For example, we hope this conference will bring together such figures as:

• anthropologists of oral and folk cultures
• historians of the book and reading publics
• political scientists and legal scholars interested in alternative
• approaches to intellectual property
• media educators who aim to help students think about their ethical responsibilities in this new participatory culture
• artists ready to discuss appropriation and collaboration in their own work
• economists and business leaders interested in the new relationships that are emerging between media producers and consumers
• activists and netizens interested in the ways new technologies democratize who has the right to be an author

Among topics the conference might explore:

• history of authorship and copyright
• folk practices in traditional and contemporary society
• appropriating materials from other cultures: political and ethical dilemmas
• poetics and politics of fan culture
• blogging, podcasting, and collective intelligence
• media literacy and the ethics of participatory culture
• artistic collaboration and cultural production, past and present
• fair use and intellectual property
• sampling and remixing in popular music
• cultural production in traditional and developing societies
• Web 2.0 and the "architecture of participation"
• creative industries and user-generated content
• parody, spoofs, and mash-ups as critical commentary
• game mods and machinima
• the workings of genre in different media systems
• law and technological change

Short abstracts of no more than 200 words for papers or panels should be sent via email to Brad Seawell at [email protected] no later than January 5, 2006. Brad can be reached by phone at 617-253-3521. Email submissions are preferred, but abstracts can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
14N-430
MIT
Cambridge , MA 02139

This will be our fifth media in transition conference. The previous conferences were the inaugural Media in Transition conference, MiT2: globalization and convergence, MiT3: television and MiT4: the work of
stories.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:05 PM | TrackBack

CFP - The one I lost

I was asked to post a CFP for a conference to be held later this year or maybe next year...in Portugal, I think.  *sigh*  And through an annoying set of technological problems I lost the post...and the email...and the response email I sent.  SO if the person who asked me to post the CFP would resend the text I will get it online as soon as possible.  Ain't technology grand....Call for Papers I am tracking

Posted by prolurkr at 09:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - FILLERS IN GRAMMAR AND DISCOURSE

FILLERS IN GRAMMAR AND DISCOURSE                                     
Panel Proposed at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference
8-13 July 2007, Goeteborg, Sweden
http://www.let.uu.nl/~Nino.Amiridze/personal/organization/fillers.html

SCOPE
===========
We would like to invite researchers interested in the role of fillers in grammar and discourse to submit abstracts for participation in a panel proposed for the 10th International Pragmatics Conference.  Contributions studying various types of fillers, their morphophonology, morphosyntax, pragmatics and/or diachronic development in a particular language or across a sample of languages are welcome. We would also be interested to have contributions from psycholinguists working on fillers in language acquisition and from neurolinguists who are interested in the use of repair strategies in lexical access failure.

DATES
===========
If you are interested, please send one page abstract (with an optional additional page for data and references) by September 4, 2006 to  [email protected]

You will be informed on acceptance/rejection in the beginning of October, 2006.

ORGANIZERS
===========
Nino Amiridze, Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
Hiroaki Kitano, Aichi University of Education (Japan)

PUBLICATION
===========
If after the meeting there will be interest in publishing either a proceedings or a special journal issue, then the organizers will take responsibility of finding a suitable forum and will act as editors.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:43 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Complexity Theory and Cultural Artifacts

Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)
March 8-11, 2007
Chicago, IL

Complexity Theory and Cultural Artifacts

Papers are sought which apply scholarship from the growing field of Complexity Studies (dealing with emergence, cultural complexity, protocol, control, information, technology, network theory) in their
analysis of mediated texts.  Of particular interest are papers which address the role of complexity and cultural artifacts in relation to multiculturalism, nationalism, transnationalism, postcolonialism, or
identity politics, as manifest withinin (or in relation to) the public sphere.

Proposals covering any media are welcome.  Please send a 150-250 word abstract plus a vita and bio statement to Dr. Mike S. DuBose at [email protected] by August 20, 2006.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:31 PM | TrackBack

CFP - 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies

3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies
hosted by
Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan U.S.A.
June 28-30, 2007

Conference Website: http://ebusiness.tc.msu.edu/cct2007/

Following the success of two prior conferences, we cordially invite submissions to the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T 2007), hosted by Michigan State University. This biennial meeting serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities - both physical and virtual - and information and communication technologies.

C&T 2007 welcomes contributions from researchers in many fields, given the multidisciplinary and collaborative nature of inquiries into the interaction between community and technology. Past meetings have involved researchers working in such areas as computer supported cooperative work, computer supported collaborative learning, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, human computer interaction, information systems, community informatics, knowledge management, and Internet studies; across such fields as anthropology, communication, computer science, economics, geography, information studies, information systems, management science, political science, psychology, sociology, and telecommunication. The conference program includes competitively selected, peer-reviewed papers, as well as workshops, tutorials, and a small number of invited speakers.

Important Dates:

November 13, 2006: Paper submission deadline

December 4, 2006: Deadline for submission of workshop proposals

Conference Themes:

There are many definitions of community. We focus on the notion of communities as social entities comprised of actors who share something in common: this common element may be geography, needs, interests, practices, organizations, or other bases for social connection. Communities are considered to be a basic unit of social experience. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) can interact with communities in many complex ways. For example, ICTs can support community formation and development by facilitating communication and coordination among members. Conversely, the lack of attention to the surrounding community context may inhibit the design and effective use of ICT innovations. Hence, new research into the creation, use, and evaluation of ICTs aimed at community support is appearing at an increasing rate. New phenomena such as blogs, podcasting, smart mobs, and the popularity of social network software illustrate some of the new areas for research into the powerful and changing connections between community and technology. Empirical, conceptual, and design contributions are invited, involving a range of methodologies and approaches. These might include application designs, innovative frameworks, case studies, ethnographies, experiments, survey research, network analyses or economic studies.

Topics appropriate for submission to this conference are manifold. Examples of some of the vibrant areas of communities and technology research include, but are not limited to:

• virtual community formation and development
• communities of interest and practice, knowledge sharing and organizational learning
• communities and innovation
• community informatics
• technical support for communities
• innovative applications of communityware
• ad hoc communities and ICTs
• innovations in community technology design
• system platforms for e-community research
• design methods for communityware
• ICTs and geographical business communities (e.g. clusters and/or regional development)
• ICTs and virtual business communities
• community e-commerce business models
• interactions between online and offline communities
• social capital, communities, and technology
• communities and e-government
• ethnographic and case studies of virtual communities
• trust, privacy and security issues in virtual communities
• communities, technology and social movements
• interaction in large scale online communities
• persistent conversation in technology-facilitated communities
• supporting collaboration in local and distributed communities
• economics of technology-facilitated communities
• inter-organizational communities and technology
• communities, technology, learning and education

Submitting Papers and Workshop Proposals

Completed and original research papers of not more 20 pages must be submitted electronically to the conference website, and will undergo a peer review process. More information is available at the conference web site.

We also invite the submission of proposals for workshops, which will be held on Thursday, June 28, 2007, the first day of the conference. Workshops can be either half or full day in length and built around specific themes relevant to the conference. Workshop proposals should be 4 pages in length, and should define the theme(s) of the workshop, the main activities and goals, the background and contact information of the organizer(s), the maximum number of participants in the workshop, the means of soliciting participants, and the method of selecting participants. Proposals should also include a brief summary of no more than 150 words suitable for describing the workshop in the conference program.

Proceedings

The Communities and Technologies 2007 Proceedings will be published by Springer, and will be available both as a bound volume and online for global digital access.

Conference Organizers and Contact Information

The 2007 meeting is being co-organized by Charles Steinfield and Brian Pentland of Michigan State University, Mark Ackerman of the University of Michigan, and Noshir Contractor of the University of Illinois. Questions regarding C&T 2007 should be sent to the conference email address, which is [email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 10:02 AM | TrackBack

CFP - 9th International General Online Research 2007

 9th International GOR Conference
         GOR 07
GENERAL ONLINE RESEARCH '07
March, 26-28,2007
at University of Leipzig, Germany

---------------------------------------------------------------

Organized by:

German Society for Online Research - DGOF e.V.

local organizers:

Prof. Dr. M. Haller
Prof. Dr. G.Heyer
Dr. M. Welker

---------------------------------------------------------------

Conference topics include theories, methods, and findings concerning social and business aspects of
the Internet and mobile communication.

The aim of the conference is to document the progress of Internet science, innovative developments, and practical experience.

Traditionally, GOR conferences have been excellent opportunities for dialogue between:

- researchers and users of Internet science
- universities and companies
- customers and suppliers.
---------------------------------------------------------------

Conference Languages: English, German
-------------------------------------

Contributions:
--------------
Paper presentations, roundtable presentations, posters, and sessions can be proposed on the following topics:

A: The Internet as a Research Tool

Online Market Research and Social Research
- Methods' Effects of Online Data Collection
- Mobile Data Collection
- Statistical Biases in Online Sampling
- Best Practice Examples
- Innovative Data Collection Tools
- Online Access Panels
- Quality Standards
- Data Mining
- Online Experiments
- Mixed Mode Studies


B: The Internet Measured

- Indices of the Digital Divide(s) and Digital Inequality
- Use of Logfiles and Databases
- Indices of the Information Society
- Measurement of Range of Coverage
- Measurement of Online Social Networks
- Diffusion of Visual Online & Mobile Communication

C: The Internet in its Context

Internet, Mobile Communication, and Civil Society
- Online Groups & Online Communities
- Social Networks and Relationships Online & Offline
- Digital Inequality
- E-Democracy
- Internet, Social Movements, and Collective Action
- Internet & Science

Electronic & Mobile Business
- E-Business
- Evaluation of Web-Sites and E-Commerce
- Mobile Commerce
- Electronic Customer Relationship Management

Internet & Mobile Communication in Everyday Life
- Mobile & Online Entertainment
- Social and Psychological Effects of Internet Use
- E-Health
- E- & M-Learning
- New Forms and Formats: Internet-TV, Blogs, Podcasts, RSS etc.

Internet & Mobile Communication in Organizations
- Online Employee Surveys
- Virtual Teams & Online Communities of Practice
- Online Knowledge Exchange and Knowledge Management
  in Organizations

Internet and Journalism
- Search Engines, Search Strategies, and Social Outcomes
- Computer Assisted Reporting
- Analytical Reporting and Data-Mining
- Automats, Robots, and Journalism
- Text Mining and Journalism
- Semantic Webs and Topic Maps
- Digital Censorship

------------------------------------------------------------

We ask for 4 types of submissions.

1.) Paper Presentations
------------------------------
Paper presentations of research results include an oral presentation of max. 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for discussion time.

Selected contributions will be invited to submit their paper for publication in an international English
language conference proceedings' volume or in an international English language journal.

2.) Posters
-----------------------------
Posters will be discussed at fixed times.  The best poster(s) will be awarded by an independent jury. Prize total: EUR 500,-.

3.) Complete Session Proposals
-----------------------------
There is the opportunity to propose a group of (3-5) interrelated paper presentations within one session.


4.) Roundtable presentations
-----------------------------
These short oral presentations of 10 minutes include work in progress reports. 3-5 related reports will be discussed at one Roundtable.

Workshops
-----------------------------
There will be tutorial workshops covering key methods of Internet Science. The workshops will take place March 26, 2007.

Participation in workshops is not free of charge and the number of participants will be limited.  Registered visitors of the conference have priority.  More information is available at http://www.gor.de.

Exhibition Stand Space:
----------------------------------
Companies will have the opportunity to book exhibition stand space for presentations of products or services. More information is available [email protected]

Social Events and Membership Meeting:
-----------------------------------------------------------
The traditional early-bird-meeting will take place in the evening of March 26, 2007. During this meeting visitors and participants will have the opportunity to socialize with colleagues and meet with other researchers.

On Tuesday 27th March 2007, there will be a social event in the evening which will include dinner and dancing.

During the conference there will be a meeting of the members of the German Society for Online Research. The members will receive additional information about the meeting at a later date.
------------------------------------------------------------

                 --------------------------------
                   Submission Guidelines
                 --------------------------------

If you would like to contribute to the conference by presenting a paper, roundtable report, a poster, or a
complete session please submit (an) abstract(s) electronically no later than:

                    September 30th 2006

to:                 http://www.gor.de

Abstracts should contain no more than 350 words. The abstract has to be written in English language. An additional German language version is appreciated, if possible.

Authors may present in English or German. In any case the transparencies of the paper presentaions have to be in English language.

Abstracts can be only submitted via the Web-based online tool located at the GOR-Website. All abstracts will be reviewed by an international board.

Authors will receive notification of acceptance by:

                    November 30, 2006.

The preliminary program will be posted by January 1st, 2007 at the following URL:

                 http://www.gor.de

Accepted oral presentation transparencies or Power-Point files in English are to be sent
by February 17th 2007.

--------------------------
Conference Fees:
--------------------------

Conference fees include tax, conference materials, two lunches, conference dinner, drinks and snacks during breaks.

Researchers: 180 Euros
Students: 90 Euros
Presenting participants: 145 Euros (first authors only)
Commerical participants (e.g. company representatives, free-
lancers,
consultants): 465 Euros

Participants living in the EU will have to pay full conference fees in advance. Other participants may pay their fees on the conference date at the venue. Day tickets are not available.

DGOF members are subject to a 20% conference fee reduction (membership application forms can be found at:  http://www.dgof.de/Texte/dgof_antrage.pdf).

Early registrants (excluding DGOF members), who register before January 20, 2007 receive a fee reduction of 15%.

For first authors there are special deadlines for registration:

After notification of acceptance (Nov. 30, 2006) first authors can register immediately. First authors who register no later than December 15, 2006 receive a fee reduction of 15% (not valid for DGOF members). First authors have to register no later than December 31, 2006.

Registration for all other participants will begin on January 1st 2007. Further detailed information will be
posted continually at the following URL:  http://www.gor.de

------------------------------
Important deadlines:
------------------------------

09/30/06                         Deadline for abstract submission

11/30/06                         Feedback on acceptance /
                                     Registration of authors begins

01/01/07                         Preliminary program will be published /
                                     General registration begins

03/26/06-03/28/06           Conference + workshops
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Summary of contacts:

Conference Website,
Abstract submission, Workshops:    http://www.gor.de
Business activities &
any further questions:                      [email protected]

=======================================
Uwe Matzat
Sociology Section
Department of Technology Management
Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven
The Netherlands
email: [email protected]
http://www.tue-tm-soc.nl/~matzat/

Posted by prolurkr at 05:20 PM | TrackBack

CFP - International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

I am pleased to send you the attached formal announcement for the 4th Annual Conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to be held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney from July 2 - 5, 2007.  The theme of the conference is: "Locating Learning: Integrative Dimensions of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning."

The conference will bring together academics from all disciplines in higher education, senior administrators, professional staff and postgraduate students to explore research findings in the scholarship of teaching and learning and the impact of this research in higher education.

The keynote speakers for 2007 are: 

• Professor Alan Luke (Queensland University of Technology). Professor Luke is Professor of Education at QUT. His research interests include literacy and language, accountability and assessment, and comparative pedagogies. He was formerly Dean of Education at Univ of Queensland, Deputy Director General of Education in Queensland and Chief Educational Advisor to the Minister. From 2002-2005, Professor Luke was the Foundation Dean of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice in Singapore.
• Dr. Andrée Sursock (Deputy Secretary General, European University Association). Andree Sursock has played a key role in the Bologna Process. She oversees the EUA Institutional Evaluation Programme, the Management Seminar and the Quality Culture Project, and is involved in the development of EUA's policy position for European and international quality assurance. 
• Professor Carl Wieman (Univ of Colorado-Boulder).  Carl Wieman is the 2001 Physics Nobel Laureate and 2004 Council for Advancement and Support of Education and Carnegie Foundation National Professor of the Year. Professor Wieman contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to launch the creation of the Physics Education Technology project (PhET) which provides interactive physics instruction on the World Wide Web.

We expect an attendance of 600+ delegates from Australia, New Zealand, UK, US, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Asia, China, India, South America and South Africa.  This is the first time the conference will be held in this part of the world. 

The call for abstracts and registration information will be available in October.  Please feel free to contact me should you require any further information.

I hope you will be able to join us at this event and look forward to welcoming you.

With best wishes,
Kathy Takayama [email protected]

ISSOTL Regional Vice President (Australasia)
Chair, 2007 ISSOTL Conference

Senior Lecturer
School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences
The University of New South Wales
Sydney  NSW  2052
Australia

Posted by prolurkr at 02:37 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Digital Feminisms: Gender and New Technologies

The complexity of new technologies has altered the way we think about time, space and ourselves in the digital age. Whether it is business, media, entertainment, advocacy, art, education, social action, politics, paid and unpaid work, or a myriad of other sites of contention, the ability of new technology to converge with and transform past, present and future ways of interacting with the world in which we live has immense and wide-ranging implications.

Given this context, we are seeking contributions to a special issue of Atlantis focused on Gender and New Technologies. We invite submissions that contribute to an inquiry on how new technologies have informed gender's self expression and histories; affected gender, race and culture; influenced the representation of gender; and changed the way in which gender issues are viewed or pursued. In pursuit of a diverse and wide-ranging debate, the issue seeks contributions from a broad range of areas, including Women's Studies, Gender Studies, New Media, Cultural, Film and Communications Studies, History, Visual Arts, Computer Science and any other area relevant to the discussion. Given the complexities of new technologies, we wish to encourage submissions that think across geographical divides, histories and media, including (but not limited to) the Internet, digital arts, locative media, WiFi, aesthetic and narrative analysis, film, video, television, educational software/delivery, medical technologies, and visual and digital art.

Interdisciplinary approaches combining target areas are also welcomed. 
Possible topics for this issue include, but are not limited to:

• New technologies, gender and self
• Gender and digital art 
• New technologies, gender and race
• Gender and convergent technologies 
• New technologies, gender and media 
• Gender and the digital body 
• New technologies, gender and history 
• Gender and digital networking 
• New technologies, gender and environmentalism 
• Gender and discourses in computer science 
• New technologies, gender and social action 
• Gender and digital identities 
• Gender and issues of access to new technologies

All contributions should be accessible to an audience from many different backgrounds interested in participating in the creation and sharing of feminist knowledge. Atlantis articles are peer reviewed. They contribute to a publication that strives to meet the most significant academic and feminist expectations of our colleagues. Articles submitted for consideration must be no longer than 6000 words (including notes, references, appendices, etc.) and must be typed double-spaced. Please send submissions, in sextuplicate, addressed to Cecily Barrie at the Atlantis address below.

Information regarding the contributors' guidelines may be found at the web site (www.msvu.ca/atlantis), or by contacting the Atlantis office.

Please note: When an article is accepted for publication in Atlantis, we ask that the contributor subscribe to the journal for one year. Like many other journals, our fiscal base is vulnerable. Subscribers to Atlantis create the possibility for the dissemination of feminist knowledge in the form of peer reviewed articles, community voices, curriculum reflections and book reviews. As contributors of peer reviewed articles, their subscriptions will assist in keeping the journal in print and available to the larger community of feminist thinkers and doers. In exchange, they will receive both the spring and fall editions plus an extra copy of the edition carrying their article.

GUEST EDITORS:      Sheila Petty and Barbara Crow
SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  February 1, 2007

Institute for the Study of Women / Mount Saint Vincent University  Halifax NS Canada B3M 2J6 / tel: 902-457-6319 fax: 902-443-1352

Posted by prolurkr at 05:58 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media - Traversing Narrative Media

CFP - REFRACTORY: A JOURNAL OF ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA
SPECIAL ISSUE: TRAVERSING NARRATIVE MEDIA

The online journal REFRACTORY is seeking contributions regarding narrative in cinema, television and new media. We invite a variety of approaches and topics, but are particularly interested in essays that explore new areas and objects of narrative study, or offer new perspectives on existing debates.

For example, certain theorists have suggested that narrative is increasingly displaced in the age of digital media, or that narrative’s claim on early cinema has been overstated. These debates intertwine with arguments regarding the depletion of narrative’s influence within postmodern image culture. How do these arguments relate to what may appear to be, from some perspectives, the strange perseverence of narrative in contemporary culture? How is narrative reframed within that culture, and how do shifts in our conception of narrative alter our understanding of existing debates and texts?

The potential scope of analysis is very broad: published essays may offer close analysis of individual works, for example, or address wider theoretical or historical questions.

Possible areas for consideration:

• Narrative aesthetics.
• Time/space and narrative.
• Narrative and modernity/postmodernity.
• Memory/history and narrative.
• Narrative and early cinema.
• Narrative and digital media/computer games.
• Television narratives.
• Narrative and the DVD format.
• Literary adaptation and narrative.
• Revisiting narrative theory.

Please submit completed articles of 3,000-7,000 words to the guest editor Allan Cameron ([email protected]) electronically as a rich text format document by July 31 2006. Articles should be formatted using the Chicago Author-Date System (see Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed). Refractory is a fully refereed journal. All submissions will be anonymously peer reviewed before acceptance.

Allan Cameron
Cinema Studies Department
The School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010 Australia
Refractory website:
http://www.ahcca.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/

Posted by prolurkr at 04:36 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Writing Research Across Borders

Writing Research Across Borders
February 22-24, 2008
University of California Santa Barbara

Conference website; http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf08/

Proposal Deadline: May 1, 2007
Email: [email protected]

Recent decades have seen the growth of writing studies in many nations, focused on all levels of education, and all uses of writing in society, using the resources of many different disciplines. This increased research attention to writing reflects an increased recognition of the importance of writing in modern societies. Yet to a large extent the many emerging traditions of writing research have neither connected fully nor shared their work.

This conference brings together the many writing researchers from around the world, drawing on all disciplines, and focused on all aspects ofwriting at all levels of development and in all segments of society. This will be an opportunity to learn from different research traditions, share our findings, seek common agendas, and lay the groundwork for future communication and alliances.

As a first step to building this important conversation we have invited some of the leading writing researchers, and those listed at the bottom of this call have already committed to participating.

We are now issuing an open call for proposals for panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations addressing

• current research on writing,
• methodological issues
• reflections on ongoing research programs
• considerations of national or disciplinary trajectories of research
• agendas for further research

We anticipate a program of up to two hundred and fifty presentations.

Proposals to present current research should specify research questions, methods, data corpus, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research project. Proposals to provide overviews of and reflections on research traditions and agendas should identify clearly the relevant literatures to be considered.

Proposals for individual and poster presentations should be from 250 to 500 words in length and panel and roundtable proposals, 500 to 1000 words. Please indicate your preferred format.

Proposals should be sent by May 1, 2007 via email to [email protected] .Please include complete contact information.

For further information please visit our conference website: http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf08/
If you have any questions contact us at [email protected]

INVITED SPEAKERS already committed to participating:

Paula Carlino, Argentina, University of Buenos Aires
Caroline Channock, Australia, Latrobe
Rosemary Clerehan, Australia, Monash University
Luuk van Waes, Belgium, University of Antwerp
Angela Dionisio, Brazil, UFP, Recife
Angela Kleiman, Brazil, Unicamp-Sao Paulo
Marilyn Chapman, Canada, University of British Columbia
Graham Smart,Canada, Carleton University
Denis Alamargot, France, University of Poitiers
Michel Fayol, France, University Blaise Pascal
Frederic Francoise, France, Université de Paris V
Annie Piolat, France, University de Provence
Sylvie Plane, France, IUF de Paris
Yves Reuter, France, Université Lille
Joachim Grabowski, Germany, University of
Education, Heidelberg, GermanyPietro
Boscolo, Italy, University of Padua
Emilia Ferreiro, Mexico, National Polytechnic Institute
Gert Rijlarsdam, Netherlands, University of Amsterdam
Lisa Emerson,New Zealand, Massey University
Olga Dysthe, Norway, University of Bergen
Rochelle Kapp, South Africa, University of Cape Town
Liliana Tolchinsky, Spain, University of Barcelona
Linda Allal, Switzerland, Universite de Geneve
Otto Kruse, Switzerland, University of Applied Sciences Erfurt, Switzerland
David Galbraith, UK, University of Staffordshire
Ken Hyland, UK, University of London
Roz Ivanic, UK, Lancaster University
Theresa Lillis, UK, Open University
Brian Street, UK, Kings College- London
Mark Torrance, UK, University of Staffordshire
Arnetha Ball, USA, Stanford University
Charles Bazerman, USA, University of California Santa Barbara
Anne Beaufort,USA, SUNY Stony Brook
Carol Berkenkotter, USA, University of Minnesota
Virginia Berninger, USA, University of Washington
Sheridan Blau,USA, University of California Santa Barbara
Ulla Connor, USA, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Christiane Donahue, USA, University of Maine, Farmington
Ann Dyson, USA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Jill Fitzgerald, USA, University North Carolina Chapel Hill
Steve Graham, USA, Vanderbilt
Kris Gutierrez,USA, University of California Los Angeles
Christina Haas, USA, Kent State University
Richard Haswell, USA, TAMU Corpus Christi
John R. Hayes, USA, Carnegie Mellon University
George Hillocks, USA, University of Chicago
Tom Huckin, USA, University of Utah
Susan Jarratt, USA, University of California Irvine
Ilona Leki, USA, University of Tennessee
Paul LeMahieu, USA, University of California Berkeley
Andrea Lunsford, USA, Stanford University
Karen Lunsford, USA, University of California Santa Barbara
Charles MacArthur, USA, University of Delaware
Paul Matsuda, USA, University of New Hampshire
Debra McCutcheon, USA, University of Washington
Heidi McKee, USA, Miami University
Sandy Murphy, USA, UC Davis
Bill Nagy, USA, Seattle Pacific University
Sondra Perl, USA, CUNY Graduate Center
Jim Porter, USA, Michigan State University
Paul Prior, USA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
David Russell, USA, State University
Rebecca Rickly, USA, Texas Technological University
Tony Silva, USA, Purdue University
Peter Smagorinsky, USA, University of Georgia
Melanie Sperling, USA, University of California Riverside
Clay Spinuzzi, USA, University of Texas Austin
John Swales, USA, University of Michigan
Chris Thaiss, USA, University of California Davis
Gary Troia, USA, Michigan State University
Kathleen Blake Yancey, USA, Florida State University

Professor Charles Bazerman
Department of Education
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
phone: 805-893-7543
[email protected]
http://www.education.ucsb.edu/bazerman

Posted by prolurkr at 08:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - Handbook of Research on Computer Mediated Communication (edited collection)

Call for Chapters for the Handbook of Research on Computer Mediated Communication
Editor: Sigrid Kelsey, MLIS
Louisiana State University

Introduction: Technology has changed communication drastically in recent years. Podcasts, Email, the World Wide Web, Blackberries, cell phones, text messaging, wireless connections, and other forms of computer mediated communication (CMC) have transformed communication in numerous ways, not only facilitating the speed and sometimes ease of communicating, but redefining and shaping today's communication norms. The Handbook of Research on Computer Mediated Communication will provide comprehensive coverage of the most important current issues, trends, and technologies related to professional computer mediated communication.

Coverage: The Handbook of Research on Computer Mediated Communication will feature chapters (50007000 words) of a scholarly nature, written by experts offering indepth descriptions of concepts, issues, and trends in various areas of CMC. The purpose of this handbook is to provide academic articles written in a more nonacademic style, in the sense that each article should focus on a specific topic rather than a general treatment of CMC keeping in mind a readership with a varied background. This will allow scholarly ideas to be accessibleof a wide range of readers. This book will explore various forms of CMC chapter by chapter and discuss the broad implications that each medium is having on communication.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to:

• Email
• Web Sites, web pages
• Blackberries
• Podcasts, RSS
• Chatrooms
• Instant messaging
• Text messaging
• Cell phones
• Corporate blogging (may mention implications of personal blogging in the workplace)
• Digital divide
• File sharing, peer to peer networking
• Online forums
• Computer mediated collaboration
• Wikis
• Historical aspects of CMC
• Effects of CMC on research participation
• Web Design and visual CMC

Submission Procedure: Individuals interested in submitting chapters should submit a chapter proposal of one singlespaced page on or before September 30, 2006 to Sigrid Kelsey at [email protected] (Rich Text Format or Microsoft Word is acceptable). The proposal should include the purpose and content of the proposed chapter and how the proposed chapter relates to the overall objectives of the book. Upon acceptance of their proposals, authors will have until December 31, 2006, to prepare their chapters of 50007000 words. Guidelines for preparing chapters will be sent upon acceptance of proposals. This book is tentatively scheduled for publishing by Idea Group Reference (an imprint of Idea Group Inc.), , in 2008.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:27 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Save as...: Digital Memories (edited collection)

SAVE AS...:DIGITAL MEMORIES
Edited Collection

Edited by Anna Reading (London South Bank University), Joanne Garde-Hansen (University of Gloucestershire and Andrew Hoskins (Swansea University)

This co-edited book aims to address how digital media are changing the languages, forms and practices of memory. The book explores how digital media technologies such as the World Wide Web, mobile video phone, personal computer, digital archives and video games may be rearticulating discourses of memory, memory prosthetics and the practices associated with commemorating, recalling and memorialising the past. Articles in the book will include original,  trans-cultural and international research and may critically synthesize and seek to extend theoretical material from the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, holocaust studies, psychology, philosophy, sociology, media studies, museum studies, and psychoanalysis. The book seeks to be an accessible but scholarly critique aimed at level 2 & 3 undergraduates and MA level postgraduate students on a growing number of courses/modules in memory studies from within a variety of disciplines.

We require abstracts for chapters of 200 words plus a biography for one of the following sections. We strongly encourage submissions from non-UK scholars or on non-UK themes. DEADLINE AUGUST 31st 2006 to Anna Reading, [email protected]

Part One: Digital Memory Discourses (section editor Andrew Hoskins)

This section traces the growing public, academic, and mediated discursive contestations of a past that seems increasingly interdependent upon digital media, for its survival in the present Contributions will map the shifting modes and media of documentation and later representation of the past, against discourses on that past Abstract proposals for this section can include (but are not restricted to) the following topics/themes:

Digital media as memory 'schema', Digital media ecologies, Personal vs. public memory discourses, Virtual spaces, biographies, Institutional memory, News narratives, Journalistic testimonies, Visual media 'templates', Photojournalism

Part Two: Digital Memory Forms (section editor Anna Reading)

This section addresses how digital, mobile and interactive media environments are providing new media forms and prosthetics for personal and public memories in different cultural contexts. The contributions will address the extent to which the impact of digital media on forms of memory is important to a reworking of the theoretical understandings of time and space in relation to mediated commemorating, remembering, witnessing and forgetting in post-industrial 21st century societies Abstract proposals for this section could include new research on the past in relation to digital media forms and environments such as history in video games, the digital mobile family album; sound and music sampling; digital diaries and blogs.

Part Three: Digital Memory Practices (section editor Joanne Garde-Hansen)

History from below is now mediated through digital storytelling, weblogs, personal journalism, online reunion sites, personal digital collections, digital memory mapping, as well as peer to peer networks. A number of theoretical implications now arise as personal memories intersect with 'memory institutions'; concerning editing, organization, interpretation, visibility, accessibility, archivability, permanency, corruptibility, obsolescence, and future use. This section addresses such implications for our understanding of mediated memory, history and forgetting.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:21 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition (edited collection)

Proposals are sought for essays to be published in an edited collection titled Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition. Please see the description of the proposed collection below. Cambridge Scholars Press has expressed interest in publishing this collection; negotiations for publication will be completed later this year, and completed essays will be due in late 2006.

Description:   

The history of reading is a relatively new field of study that brings together scholars from literature, history, sociology, philosophy, and law. Growing out of early works like Richard Altick's The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (© 1957), and coalescing in a dedicated professional organization (SHARP, or The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) in 1991, the study of reading has been largely defined by two distinct (and divergent) methodologies. On the one hand, scholars have approached the subject empirically, focusing on a specific historical moment and gathering detailed statistics about such issues as literacy rates (and how literacy was measured), library subscriptions, publication and sales figures, and print runs to answer questions about what was being read and by whom in a particular place and time. On the other, scholars have approached the subject theoretically, focusing on how meaning is created and conditioned by a theoretical (and often largely ahistorical) "reader." 

Both methodologies have much to offer. The theoretical approach generates insights into the locus of meaning-making, the nature of textual authority, and the intellectual, social, and political potentialities of reading, while the empirical approach reconstructs specific scenes of reading with a wealth of details and historically-specific data. But too often we have pursued either one approach or the other, rather than looking for ways to synthesize the philosophical issues of reading with the empirical information that would enrich their claims and validate them for particular historical moments. In recent years, some excellent work has begun to suggest ways to integrate the two approaches. But this work, while valuable, has focused on particular moments and texts in literary history and therefore has not taken as its central concern the advancement methodologies for studying and writing about the history of reading.

This proposed essay collection thus fills a gap in the study of the history of reading. Because its primary aims are (1) to synthesize empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of reading and (2) to foreground issues of methodology rather than literary history, it will be a first-of-its-kind volume that will be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines connected to the study of the history of reading, publishing, and the book.

Please send inquiries, full articles (3000-4500 words), or 1000-word article abstracts to Bonnie Gunzenhauser ([email protected]) by August 15, 2006. 

Posted by prolurkr at 12:08 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Technoculture Computers and Writing Online 2007

Computers and Writing Online 2007
February 5 through February 9, 2007

Conference Co-Chairs: Dr. Keith Dorwick,
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Dr. Kevin Moberly,
St. Cloud State University

Conference Co-Chairs Keith Dorwick and Kevin Moberly are seeking synchronous and asynchronous presentations that address a wide conception of scholarship that focuses on a range of issues that could be briefly summed up as “technology and society,” or, perhaps, “technologies and societies.” Successful papers for this online conference should focus on the ways humanists read technology as a special case of cultural studies.

In particular, the conference co-chairs are interested in a conception of “technology” and the “humanist impulse” that pushes beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers; we seek papers that deal with any technology or technologies in any number of historical periods from any relevant theoretical perspective.

Presentations from scholars in all disciplines who are working on the intersection of culture and technology (see our now lapsed call for "Technoculture," a special issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities archived on this site for a further description of our interests) are welcome. Papers need not focus on writing instruction, in spite of the name of the conference, to be considered. Papers about how to do or work with technology that do not look beyond the use of technology to its cultural meaning will NOT be accepted.

NOTE ABOUT THE CONFERENCE: For years, the research of scholars involved with the connections between computers and writing (CW) has focused largely on, well, “computers” and “writing.” With the continued maturation of that sub-discipline, CW scholars have begun to think about a wider conception of our own work, with research and teaching that focuses on a range of issues that could be briefly summed as “technology and society.”

Successful presentations for Computers and Writing Online 2007 should focus on the ways compositionists and other scholars currently studying the use of technology might rethink our work and move beyond composition to a larger focus on cultural studies that could include but not be as dependent on writing instruction.

The keynote events will consist of panels comprising first, second and third generation scholars (those who founded the subdiscipline without specific training in CW but in other areas of English studies; those trained by those first wave scholars specifically in CW; and those new voices trained by specialists by training and research now graduating and entering their careers) and other online events that focus on where we’ve been and where we need to go.

For both asynchronous and synchronous events, eight page papers will be due in .doc, .rtf, .pdf (or the hypertext equivalent) and placed on the computersandwriting.org website for pre-conference reading by Jan. 31, 2007; discussions will follow during the conference period. The conference will be held February 5 through February 9, 2007. Synchronous events will be held in AcadianaMOO at http://acadianamoo.org; asynchronous events will be held on the Computers and Writing website.

One page conference proposals due to [email protected] by midnight, Friday November 17, 2006.

Dr. Keith Dorwick
Assistant Professor of English and Rhetoric
Department of English
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette
P.O. Box 44691
Lafayette, LA 70504-4691
Internet (VoIP) Number: 1 (773) 362 4707

Posted by prolurkr at 11:25 AM | TrackBack

CFP - 'Language, Communication, Culture' Conference

4th International 'Language, Communication, Culture' Conference
Lisbon, Lusofona University
November 28-30, 2006
http://lcc.ulusofona.pt/index_17.html

An organisation of the staff, students and associates of the 'Culture and Society' Postgraduate Pogramme University of Lisbon), of the staff of the Department of Communication, Arts and Information Technology (Lusofona University), and of Best Travel Agency.

The conference will be structured round three topics:

1. Media, media-making and the politics of news production
2. Visual culture and hegemonic cultural policies and practices 
3. Cultural studies and the production of knowledge and social change

This year’s LCC Conference will be hosted by Lusofona University, a private academic institution in Lisbon. Having previously been held in Évora and Beja, the LCC conference venue alternates annually amongst several institutions that comprise Portugal’s academic panorama. Apart from Lisbon’s centrality favouring participation in this event, both transport and accommodation-wise, Lusófona University was chosen as a venue due to this institution’s focus on communication, visual arts and new technologies. This academic slant coincides with the Conference’s principal vectors, namely media, visual culture and cultural studies.
 
For full information on the themes and sessions, Cpf, registration fees and deadlines, go to
http://lcc.ulusofona.pt/index_17.html 
 
"The LCC Conference mandate is to bring together scholars from all disciplines and fields of the humanities and social sciences with contributions on language, communication, social and cultural themes that analyse the contemporary world, its vectors of crisis, its tensions and conflicts, its lines of development, and its resources of hope."

Posted by prolurkr at 07:52 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Int. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Int. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
March 26-28, 2007
Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.
www.icwsm.org

Recent years have seen a flourishing of social media - the promise of the WWW coming to fruition. Across the world, individuals can share opinions, experiences and expertise at the push of a button. There has been a fundamental shift thanks to significant advances in the ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has been torn down.

Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in recent years is the blogosphere. Tens of thousands of new blogs are created every day; blog content is becoming ubiquitous, surfacing in news portals, search results and corporate public relations. Even those who are unaware of the blogosphere are still influenced by its content. Although blogs are highly visible currently, other forms of conversational spaces continue to flourish, especially message boards, mailing lists, review sites and Usenet.

Social media covers all forms of sharing: from photos, to videos, to recommendations. In the past few years, many examples of social media have become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo sharing site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone for sharing recommendations of websites; Web 2.0 applications in general abound with newcomers in the social media space.

One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the drive from within to study the ecology as it evolves. People act at once as creators, observers and influencers of the space in which they participate. At the same time, businesses are quickly grasping the potential benefit to attending to the new space of social media. Monitoring the aggregate trends and opinions revealed by social media provides valuable insight to a number of business applications: marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence.

The fast growing blogosphere and social media space is a fruitful area for investigations across many disciplines. For example:

• Natural language processing and machine learning researchers study the extraction of factual information from text; can blogs be processed in a robust manner and can knowledge bases be populated with facts from blogs?
• Social network researchers and graph theory researchers are concerned with inferring community structure; analyzing the linkage patterns among blog entries can provide explicit community structure; can we infer implicit communities through the content of the blogs?
• Political scientists are looking at ways of identifying influencers in a community; who are the influential bloggers whose voice is echoed by others?
• Multimedia researchers are attempting to categorize audio and video content, aggregate information from diverse sources (textual, audio, video); can visual & audio social media be stored in a way that allows search across different modalities?
• Market analysis researchers are concerned with what people think of the products and services of a company; can we process blogs automatically and find consumer complaints and breaking reports about vulnerabilities of products; also when does a burst of blogging activity become a trend?
• Social psychologists study the response to current events, including emotional and attitudinal dimensions as well as content and patterns of influence.

Despite the growing relevance of blogs and social media, existing research has only begun to address the spectrum of issues that arise in their analysis. Blogs, for example, are a different kind of document than the relatively clean text that NLP research is based on. Such differences in term of structure, content and grammaticality will be a challenge considering that blogs will likely represent the most common way of publicly accessible personal expression.

AREAS OF INTEREST

The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research in the following areas:

1. AI methods for ethnographic analysis through social media.
2. Blogosphere vs. mediasphere; measuring the influence of blogs on the media.
3. Centrality/influence of bloggers/blogs; ranking/relevance of blogs; web pages ranking based on blogs.
4. Crawling/spidering and indexing.
5. Human Computer Interaction; social media tools; navigation.
6. Multimedia; audio/visual processing; aggregating information from different modalities.
7. Semantic analysis; cross-system and cross-media name tracking; named relations and fact extraction; discourse analysis; summarization.
8. Semantic Web; unstructured knowledge management.
9. Sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction.
10. Social Network Analysis; communities identification; expertise discovery; collaborative filtering.
11. Text categorization; gender/age identification; spam filtering.
12. Time Series Forecasting; measuring predictability of phenomena based on social media.
13. Trend identification/tracking.
14. Visualization, aggregation and filtering.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submissions: December 8, 2006
• Acceptance Notifications: February 2, 2007
• Camera ready copies: February 16, 2007
• Tutorials: March 25, 2007
• Conference: March 26-28, 2007

SUBMISSION

People interested in participating should submit through the conference website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), a short paper (up to 4 pages), a poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by midnight (PST) of Dec 8, 2006. Each submission should, to the extent possible, indicate a list of relevant areas from the list above (e.g., 03, 04, 10).

CHAIRS

• Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
• Nicolas Nicolov, Umbria Inc.

CO-CHAIRS

• Eytan Adar, Univ. of Washington.
• Matthew Hurst, Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
• Mark Liberman, Univ. of Pennsylvania.
• James H. Martin, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.
• Franco Salvetti, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder & Umbria Inc.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Paolo Avesani, ITC-irst, Italy
• Bran Boguraev, IBM Research, USA
• Chris Brooks, Univ. of San Francisco, USA
• Claire Cardie, Cornell Univ., USA
• Scott Carter, UC Berkeley, USA
• Steve Cayzer, HP Labs Bristol, UK
• Thierry Declerck, DFKI Language Lab, Germany
• Donghui Feng, ISI, USC, USA
• Kathy Gill, Univ. of Washington, USA
• Michelle Gumbrecht, Stanford Univ., USA
• Eduard Hovy, ISI, USC, USA
• Jussi Karlgren, SICS, Sweden
• Laura Knudsen, OSC, USA
• Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel
• Cameron Marlow, Yahoo! Research, USA
• Lluis Marquez, Univ. Poli. de Catalunya, Spain
• Rada Mihalcea, Univ. of North Texas, USA
• Gilad Mishne, Univ. of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Tomoyuki Nanno, Google, Japan
• Apostol Natsev, IBM Research, USA
• Kamal Nigam, Google, USA
• Jon Oberlander, Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland
• Peter Pirolli, PARC, USA
• Oana Postolache, Univ. of Saarland, Germany
• John Prager, IBM Research, USA
• Alessandro Provetti, Univ. of Messina, Italy
• Drago Radev, Univ. of Michigan, USA
• Jonathon Read, Univ. of Sussex, UK
• Maarten de Rijke, Univ. of Amsterdam
• Laura Ripamonti, Univ. of Milan, Italy
• Irina Rish, IBM Watson Research Center, USA
• Dan Roth, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• James G. Shanahan, Turn Inc., USA
• Emma Shen, OSC, USA
• Suresh Sood, Univ. of Tech. Sydney, Australia
• Savitha Srinivasan, IBM Research, USA
• Carlo Strapparava, ITC-irst, Italy
• V.S. Subrahmanian, Univ. of Maryland, USA
• Belle Tseng, NEC Labs America, USA
• Janyce M. Wiebe, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA
• Tong Zhang, Yahoo! Research, USA
• Liang Zhou, ISI, USC, USA
• Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard Univ., USA

VENUE

The conference will (provisionally) take place at the newly built St. Julien hotel located in downtown Boulder, Colorado.

SPONSORS

ICWSM is proud to be supported by:

• Google, Inc.
• NEC Labs America 
• Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
• Umbria, Inc.
• University of Pennsylvania.

ICWSM is a IW3C2 endorsed conference.

HISTORY

The International Conference on Weblogs and social media grew out of two events: the annual series of Workshops on the Weblogging Ecosystem (WWE 2006, WWE 2005, WWE 2004) held in conjunction with the International World Wide Web Conference and the Spring Symposium organized by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs (CAAW 2006).

CONTACT

[email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 01:31 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Fan Cultures in the Palm of Your Hand: Cult TV in the Age of Podcasts

Society for Cinema And Media Studies Conference (SCMS)
Chicago Hilton, Chicago, IL
March 8-11, 2007

Proposals are being sought for a panel entitled "Fan Cultures in the Palm of Your Hand: Cult TV in the Age of Podcasts."  Besides exploring the subject of cult television from a variety of thematic perspectives, this panel will examine the ways in which consumption patterns and fan cultures have changed over the past three years due to the increased viability of podcasts as both method and content of multimedia delivery.

• How have mobile viewing technologies (or vodcasts) transformed fans' relationships to televisual texts that can now be downloaded from the Internet onto personal video players and consumed in public spaces?
• What role has the Internet played in strengthening and diversifying "interpretative communities" made up of fans who communicate daily, share files, and actively contribute to the cultivation of particular television shows? 
• How have producers of cult TV series such as DOCTOR WHO, LOST, and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA utilized the digital podcasting platform to expand the textual universe of their programs? 
• And how might the audio commentaries being authored by participatory audience members filter into and inform that universe in a meaningful, interactive way?

I welcome submissions that explore any of the above questions.  Panelists might also consider any of the following topics:

• Particular cult programs that began online and have since gone on to broadcast television (HAPPY TREE FRIENDS, QUEER DUCK, etc.)
• Adult Swim programing (ROBOT CHICKEN, SEALAB 2021, etc.)
• Podcasting and "textual poaching"
• Podcasting and "subcultural" sensibilities
• Podcast forms and aesthetics
• The cult of I-Pod
• Fan podcasts for particular TV series (including but not limited to):
• GILMORE GIRLS (Stars Hollow)
• ALIAS (Previously on Alias)
• VERONICA MARS (V for Veronica Mars)
• DOCTOR WHO (Podshock; The WhoCast)
• LOST (The Lost Experience)
• BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (Buffcast)
• ANGEL (Angel Investigations)
• FIREFLY (The Signal)
• STAR TREK (Starship Exeter)
• BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (Galactica Actual)
• XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS (XenaCast)
• BABYLON 5 (The Babylon Podcast)
• FARSCAPE (The ScapeCast)

Information about the conference can be found at ttp://www.cmstudies.org/.

Send proposals of 250-350 words and a short bio via email to David Scott Diffrient ([email protected]) by August 10, 2006 for consideration.

David Scott Diffrient
University of Washington in St. Louis
Mallinckrodt Center
Room 310
Campus Box 1174
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130

Posted by prolurkr at 12:18 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future

Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
October 19-21, 2006

The Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future Symposium Planning Committee is issuing a call for posters that highlight digital humanities projects, tools or techniques or work in progress. We also encourage any college or university digital humanities program, center or group to present a poster that overviews their program. Posters may include a demonstration, traditional printed poster, or a combination of both. Wireless internet access will be available at the poster venue.

Short abstracts (250-500 words) should be submitted to the conference website before June 30, 2006. The proposals will be reviewed by the planning committee and successful applicants will be notified by July 31, 2006. The poster session will take place on the evening of October 20, 2006.

Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future, will assess the current state and future prospects of digital textual studies, with an underlying emphasis on how digital media might change our ways of
knowing or experiencing textuality. The symposium will feature an opening address by Jerome McGann, and presentations by Morris Eaves, Julia Flanders, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Kenneth Price, Peter Robinson,
Peter Shillingsburg and Martha Nell Smith. For registration details see the symposim website.

For more information about the symposium or poster session, contact Maura Ives.

Posted by prolurkr at 05:28 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Children and Childhood Studies Section of The Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association 2006 Annual Conference

Children and Childhood Studies Section of The Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association 2006 Annual Conference
Baltimore, Maryland, October 27-29, 2006

The MAP/ACA is a regional division of the Popular and American Culture Associations, which are, in the words of Popular Culture Association founder Ray Browne, "multi-disciplinary associations interested in new approaches to the expressions, mass media and all other phenomena of everyday life."

From the MAP/ACA home page

Children and Childhood Studies (CCS) is a new section within MAP/ACA and is actively seeking proposals for the MAP/ACA Annual Conference.  CCS focuses on the societal, cultural, and political forces, which shape the lives of children and the concept of childhood. CCS research draws from the behavioral and social sciences as well as the arts.   Papers in this area examine the impact of popular culture on children and childhood, as well as the role of children and young adults as influencers and creators of that popular culture.

For more information about the conference visit: http://www.wcenter.ncc.edu/gazette/

To submit a proposal, please send a 150-word and a brief CV or bio the area chair listed below by June 15, 2006.  Panels of 3 or 4 presenters, single papers, roundtables, or alternative formats are encouraged. In your proposal, please indicate your AV needs.  Note:  all presenters must bring their own laptops. Only slide projectors, carousels, screens, and combined DVD players/VCRs with monitors can be provided.

2006 Annual Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association
Baltimore, MD October 27-29, 2006

Send proposals to:

Vibiana Bowman
Paul Robeson Library
Rutgers - The State University
300 North Fourth Street
Camden, NJ 08102
[email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 07:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - Workshop on Virtual Ethnography in Contemporary Social Science

Call for submissions for workshop
Virtual Ethnography in Contemporary Social Science

Submissions are invited for a workshop to be held in Amsterdam, 27- 29, September 2006.

This workshop aims to focus attention on challenges posed to ethnographic methods by the new digital and electronic media. It will be of interest to scholars engaged in ethnographic research which touches on digital media as well as other social scientists studying globalization and cultural change, digital communication, or cultures of digital media. The workshop forms part of the ongoing programme of the Virtual Knowledge Studio to study and stimulate new research practices in the humanities and social sciences.

Paper submissions are invited which address the following key themes:

• the significance of virtual ethnography for contemporary social science
• the conceptual and theoretical challenges of virtual ethnography
• emerging tools and practices for dealing with digital media

The workshop will include presentations, and a poster session. Please send abstracts (500-700 words) to [email protected]. The deadline for submissions is 15 June 2006. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee, and will be selected for a paper presentation or for the poster session. Notice of acceptance will be sent by 1 July. Following the workshop the ambition is to submit selected papers for a special issue of a journal.

The organising committee is made up of Anne Beaulieu (VKS- KNAW), Marjolein van Asselt (U. of Maastricht), Christine Hine (U. of Surrey) and  Ernst Thoutenhoofd (VKS-KNAW). This event is funded by a conference grant from the KNAW and by the VKS. Funds are available to cover travel and hotel costs for speakers whose submissions are selected for presentation at the workshop.   

Posted by prolurkr at 10:11 AM | TrackBack

CFP - HICSS Minitrack on Genres of Digital Documents

Dcument genres are communicative actions with a socially recognized communicative purpose and/or common aspects of form (such as newsletters, FAQs, and homepages). Such genres are situated in complex communicative practices; they are anchored in specific institutions and processes and can be equally applicable to physical as well as electronic documents. Recognizing the genre of a document is especially useful because it helps build an understanding among communicating parties.  Besides enhancing our understanding of information searching and use, studying genres provides insights into organizational or community structures, and leads to designing more effective and usable systems. It is becoming increasingly clear that the use of digital media brings with it the emergence of new or transformed genres of digital communication. In a digital environment, documents have functionality as well as form and content, but in many ways the contextual clues by which functionality can be ascertained may be missing. For this reason, genre provides a certain fixity in communication and becomes increasingly important in providing users a resource for the interpretation of the content, role, and function of a digital document.

Suggested topics for the Minitrack include:

• Issues in the transformation of print genres to digital form
• The evolution of genres of digital documents
• Genre theory and its application to digital documents
• Genre emergence and evolution
• Investigations of genre in use in organizational settings
• Analyses of particular document genres, e.g. email, spam, and deception
• Genre-specific automated classification/categorization/routing/filtering of text documents, including spam and deception detection
• Genre-specific document search and summarization
• Genres in non-text digital documents
• Designing systems in support of and using genre

HICSS will be held 3-6 January 2007 at the Hilton Waikoloa Village Resort, Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii. HICSS Proceedings are published and distributed by the IEEE Computer Society and carried on the IEEE Digital Library.

The firm deadline to submit papers is 15 June 2006. Authors will receive decisions regarding paper acceptances by 15 August 2006.  We would be happy to provide guidance and indication of appropriate content, so please feel free to contact us with an abstract at any time. Papers should be submitted on the reviewing system following the instructions on the HICSS website. For the latest information on the conference, please visit the HICSS web site at:  http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu or the mirror sites:  http://hicss.sepa.tudelft.nl/  and http://www.is.cityu.edu.hk/hicss/

Minitrack co-chairs:

Kevin Crowston, Professor
Syracuse University
School of Information Studies
348 Hinds Hall
Syracuse, NY   13244-4100
USA Phone:  +1 (315) 443-1676
Fax:    +1 (866)  265-7407
Web:    http://crowston.syr.edu/

Carina Ihlström, Assistant Professor
School of Information Science, Computer and Electrical Engineering
Halmstad University
P.O. Box 823
S-301 18
Halmstad Sweden
Phone: +46 35 167531
[email protected]
http://www.hh.se/staff/caih

Dmitri Roussinov, Assistant Professor
Department of Information Systems?W.P. Carey School of Business
Arizona State University
Office: BA 267 E
P.O Box 873606
Tempe, AZ, 85287
Phone: (480) 965-8488? [email protected]
http://www.public.asu.edu/~droussi/

Posted by prolurkr at 07:43 PM | TrackBack

CFP - From A to <a>: Keywords in HTML and Writing (edited collection)

Call for Papers:
From A to <a>: Keywords in HTML and Writing

A proposed collection edited by Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice

In cultural and writing studies, the relationship between new media and writing has become an important area of inquiry, as online forms such as web pages, content management systems, social software, and weblogs continue to grow in popularity. Too much scholarship, however, focuses on the instruments of technology at the expense of cultural, ideological, and rhetorical forces. In From A to <a>: Keywords in HTML ad Writing, we engage these areas of English studies by considering the omplex relationships between writing and the markup and scripting anguages which make up the web—such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) ad Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). By foregrounding the influences of markup which are less directly "technological," our proposed collection will address the many ways both novices and advanced users of technology create, consume, and shape writing and new media.

From A to <a>: Keywords in HTML and Writing takes an innovative approach to the "keywords" genre by using markup tags as keywords.  Following the keywords genre, essays should focus on a single tag or unit of markup, and break down that tag's etymological, historical, social, and cultural meanings. For example, while the tag <table> is often used to organize data in rows and columns, its role in web design cannot be ignored. Tables bring the grids of modernist graphic design to the web, with its underlying demands for rationalism, order, and regularity. For this and other tags or units of markup, the editors invite essays which engage similar inquiries. The resulting collection of essays will illustrate how the markup tags present in all web writing influence, shape, and affect the ways we read and write.

Essays can consider these and related questions:

• What rhetorical issues are raised by individual tags? How does writing influence markup? How do markup languages and tags influence writing? How do markup languages produce or influence rhetorics? As theorists of writing, do we yet understand the relationship between composing and the code underlying documents we compose?
• What ideological issues are raised by markup and writing? How does markup influence culture, and how are cultures reflected in the technologies of markup, scripting, and encoding?
• What is the pedagogy of markup? How has markup changed, re-enforced, or problematized the various theoretical and pedagogical goals associated with writing studies? How does markup inject cultural and ideological forces into educational contexts?
• As a discipline, is rhetoric and composition equipped to confront the issues which arise from the technologizing of writing? 
• How do content management systems, from weblogs to web application development platforms, change the relationship of writers and writing culture to markup and encoding?

Please email the editors a 500 word abstract which indicates the markup tag you wish to work with and outlines the issues you plan to consider. For a list of essays which have already been accepted to the collection, visit http://faculty.wiu.edu/CB-Dilger/taga/. We welcome your questions and comments.

Timeline

Abstracts: Aug 1, 2006
Acceptances: Aug 15, 2006
Drafts: Nov 1, 2006
Return drafts: Dec 1, 2006
Final essay: Feb 1, 2007

Contact information

Bradley Dilger, Assistant Professor of English, Western Illinois University
cb-dilger at wiu dot edu * http://wrecking.org/cbd/
309-298-2212

Jeff Rice, Assistant Professor of English, Wayne State University
jrice at wayne dot edu * http://ydog.net/

Posted by prolurkr at 08:08 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Special Issue of Qualitative Inquiry on Technology and Ethnography: “Technography for a Digital World”

QUALITATIVE INQUIRY
Editors: Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln
Call for Papers:
Special Issue on Technology and Ethnography: “Technography for a Digital World”

Guest Editor: Grant Kien

Submission Deadline: September 15, 2006

Microsoft, Intel, Pitney Bowes, IBM, Xerox… Numerous companies have begun to employ ethnography as an important component in their research. Has ethnography as a techno-methodology come of age in the context of globalization and hi-tech communications?

Qualitative Inquiry invites submissions of articles for a forthcoming thematic issue focusing on ethnographic approaches to the study of technology. This is a call for papers that explore methods and works that investigate technology through ethnography. While technology may be variously defined at any given moment, submissions should emphasize ways of understanding how technologies are “created, apprehended and used” in everyday life (Carey, 1989). Moving beyond mere enumeration of fetishized objects and fetishizing practices, I suggest that a neo-technographic approach should seek to show how technology is experienced and participates in everyday life experiences. That is, neo-technography should produce texts that show rather than tell, that bury the theory rather than lecture, and that provide significant and precious moments in time rather than steal them from us.

While all ethnographic methods are invited, a special encouragement is given to experimental and innovative work that endeavors to push the frontiers of ethnography in the realm of technological research, and/or make the subject of technology more present in ethnography as a disciplined approach to inquiry.
Some questions papers might address include (but are not limited to):

• Is technology a force of good and/or evil in our lives? 
• What constitutes everyday experience with technology? 
• What roles do culture, tradition and identity play in the success or failure of new technologies? 
• Are technologies racist? Sexist? Ableist? Ageist? Othering? If so, how are these everyday discriminations enacted and experienced? How then do we transcend our technologies?
• If we have ‘relationships’ with, through, or even in spite of technological devices, what feelings are evoked and how? Do we love it? Hate it? Feel nostalgia or indifference?
• How and under what circumstances are interpersonal relationships maintained, inspired by, interrupted, and/or irrelevant to technological experiences?
• How does a researcher ethically, adequately and usefully demonstrate and document what might otherwise be taken as idiosyncratic everyday or mundane technological experiences? 
• How are the ‘digital divide’ and other socio-political/economic technological constructs experienced?
• How does the networked nature of contemporary technology manifest as everyday experience? What is network in the popular imaginary?
• What questions are we missing or overlooking in ethnographic explorations of technology?

Please contact the special issue editor by email if you have any questions or are planning to submit an article.
Manuscripts should conform to the formatting standard of the QI Manuscript Submission Guidelines (available at http://www.sagepub.com/journalManuscript.aspx?pid=54). Please send both hard copies as per the instructions below.

Additionally, please submit your manuscript electronically as an email attachment to [email protected], preferably in Microsoft Word or rich text format.

MANUSCRIPTS should be prepared in accordance with the 4th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Double-space all manuscripts, including references, notes, abstracts, quotations, and tables on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. The title page should include all authors' names, affiliations, and highest professional degrees, the corresponding author's address and telephone number, and a brief biographical statement. The title page should be followed by an abstract of 100 to 150 words. Tables and references should follow APA style and be double-spaced throughout. Ordinarily, manuscripts will not exceed 30 pages (double-spaced), including tables, figures, and references. Authors of accepted manuscripts will be asked to supply camera-ready figures. In addition to emailing an electronic copy to the editor, please supply four (4) printed copies of each manuscript along with a $10 submission fee for all manuscripts (the fee is waived if the author is a graduate student). Please make checks payable to the University of Illinois. Checks must be drawn on a United States bank.

Send manuscripts to…
Grant Kien
Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
810 S Wright St, Rm. 228
Urbana, IL 61801
Tel: (217) 333-0795
Fax: (217 244-9580
Email: [email protected]

**Submission of a manuscript implies commitment to publish in the journal. Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal should not simultaneously submit them to another journal, nor should manuscripts have been published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content. Authors in doubt about what constitutes prior publication may consult the editor.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:45 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Text and Image: The Language of Images

Text and Image Conference
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT 06050

The Language of Images, March 29-30, 2007

Central Connecticut State University and the English Department invite proposals for their international, interdisciplinary Text and Image Conference on “The Language of Images” on March 29-30, 2007.

The goal of this conference is to provide a diachronic and multidisciplinary exploration of the complex and ever-evolving interaction between texts and images in fields as diverse as literature, art, philosophy, history, drama, sociology, tourism, cartography, graphic design, and the media.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Literature and the Visual Arts:
  • Literature and Photography
  • Literature and Painting
  • Literature and Film
  • Literature and Maps
  • Literature and Illustrations
  • Literature and Cartoons
  • Concrete Poetry
  • Ekphrastic Poetry
  • Graphic Novels
  • Artist Books
  • Hypertexts
• Text and Image in Art
• Text and Image in Drama
• Text and Image in History
• Text and Image in the Media
• Text and Image in Cartography
• Text and Image in Graphic Design
• Text and Image in Tourism
• Visual Sociology
• The Theory of Text and Image

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short biography as a Word attachment to [email protected]

Submissions must be received by October 1, 2006.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:51 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Authenticity

The University of Salford
An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS- AUTHENTICITY
14-15 September 2006

A two-day conference at the University of Salford for postgraduate students of the arts, media and social sciences to consider current and changing perspectives on authenticity. The intention is to stimulate debate and generate fresh understandings through interdisciplinary exchange. We welcome papers in fields such as politics, philosophy, religions and theology, sociology, psychology, literature, history, classics, visual and screen studies, and the performing arts.

Possible themes include, but are not restricted to

o   Agencies and Bodies of authenticity
o   Models and Creations of authenticity
o   Practices and Enactments of authenticity
o   Mediations and Subversions of authenticity
o   Images and Representations of authenticity
o   Concepts and Theories of authenticity

Abstracts of 250 words are invited for contributions of 20 minutes. We aim to provide a supportive and friendly environment where postgraduates can gain experience in presenting their work and meet fellow researchers. The conference also welcomes participants who do not wish to present.

Website for details and registration forms
http://www.esri.salford.ac.uk/seminars/forthcoming/index.shtml
Email for abstracts and information
[email protected]

Deadline for abstracts
30 June 2006

Posted by prolurkr at 06:37 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Special Issue of Computers in Human Behavior Journal

Integration of Human Factors in Networked Computing A Special Issue of the Computers in Human Behavior Journal

Introduction

With the advancement of the World Wide Web, networked computing has become an essential determinant on how people access and exchange information. The integration of human factors in networked computing has the intrinsic goal of improving the effectiveness of computer-to-human interaction and, ultimately, of human-to-human communication. 

Motivation

Whilst the HCI community looks predominantly at the application layer and the telecommunications community at the lower end of the ISO OSI stack, little work has been published in bridging the gap between these two communities. Indeed, the human element is often neglected in Quality of Service negotiation protocols. Not only does this have a negative and undesirable impact on the user's experience of networked computing, it also discards the potential for more economical resource allocation strategies. With the proliferation of ubiquitous multimedia in predominantly bandwidth-constrained environments, more research is needed towards integrating and mapping perceptual/human factors considerations across the protocol stack and building truly end-to-end communication solutions. 

 Research Topics

The proposed special issue aims to provide a comprehensive synopsis of state-of-the-art research in the area of integrating human factors into network computing, covering both application development and  empirical studies in areas such as virtual reality, multi-sensory based computing, ubiquitous communications, personalization and adaptation according to user needs. This special issue solicits innovative papers on the use of computational intelligence techniques and tools for the adaptive management of multimedia communication networks of the future. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

      *     The influence of task, context and device on the user experience of networked computing
      *     Integration of perceptual, haptic and emotional context in networked computing
      *     User centred evaluation of networked computing applications
      *     Physiological and visual monitoring of human indicators in multimedia systems
      *     The impact of cognitive styles and strategies in tailoring of networked content
      *     Distributed virtual reality systems
      *     Adaptation and Personalisation of distributed content according to perceptual needs 
      *     End-to-end communication architectures incorporating perceptual requirements

 Submission Format

All papers will be peer reviewed. Authors are expected to follow the formatting guidelines of the journal which can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/759/authorinstructions. Please note that for this Special Issue, all submissions should be e-mailed to the guest editors. Submission of a paper implies that it has not been published previously, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and that if accepted it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the publisher.

Important Dates

Abstract due:  26th May 2006
Notification of paper eligibility  2nd June 2006
Full paper due:  31st August 2006
Reviews due:  13th October 2006
Notification:  27th October 2006
Final Papers due:  1st December 2006

Special Issue Guest Editors

Dr. George Ghinea
School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics
Brunel University
Uxbridge, Middlesex 
UB8 3PH, U.K.
Email: [email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 1895 266033
URL: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~csstggg2/      

Dr. Sherry Y. Chen
School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics
Brunel University
Uxbridge, Middlesex
UB8 3PH, UK
Email: [email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 1895 266023
URL: http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~csstsyc/

Posted by prolurkr at 04:35 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Concordia University, Conducting Research Online

Concordia University; Montréal, QC
November 10 - 11, 2006

Technological innovations such as the Internet, cell phones, MP3 players and video game consoles have changed the ways in which people work, play, interact, communicate and define who they are.  As use of these technologies increases, so have the methodological opportunities for researchers who study the ways in which people, both children and adults, use and experience digital culture. Academic interest surrounding these emerging technologies varies as widely as the disciplines themselves.

This poses a variety of challenges in researching digital culture given that every discipline employs unique methodologies specific to their field of study. As this type of research is still emerging, opportunities for the development of original and innovative ways of capturing on-line experiences continue to arise. This makes it particularly important for scholars across a variety of disciplines to come together to share the ways in which they have pushed the limits of traditional methods and overcome the challenges of research surrounding digital culture.

We aim to invite those who have an interest in and experience with conducting research online, not only as a tool but as space of inquiry. We hope to attract a range of scholars, from students who are beginning their research to seasoned academics who can share their experiences working with digital methods. The goal of this symposium is to encourage informal discussion, therefore participation will be limited.  For this, we invite papers that focus on but not limited to:

* Ethical Issues
* Researching video game console culture
* Fieldwork Boundaries & Possibilities
* From online & offline and back again: the question of merging identity
* Post-Virtual Research: Situating the virtual as a space of inquiry after the real/virtual debate
* Ethnography in cyberspace
* The future of qualitative research online

*SUBMISSION INFORMATION:  *
300-500 word abstract, excluding references
Deadline for Submissions: July 1st, 2006
Notification of Acceptance: September 1st, 2006

Please send a copy of your abstract  to *both* Shanly Dixon, Humanitites ([email protected]) & Kelly Boudreau, Sociology & Anthropology ([email protected])

Posted by prolurkr at 04:05 PM | TrackBack

CFP - "Brushing Up Against The Grain": Creative readings (between the lines) of old Benjamin

This is a conference I wish I could afford to attend.  For those of you downunder, go and send me notes?  LOL

Proposals for papers are invited for a panel at the "Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity" conference to be held in Sydney, August 17 - 19

Panel Title; "Brushing Up Against The Grain": Creative readings (between the lines) of old Benjamin.

Chair; John Grech

Panel Description

Walter Benjamin often expresses his most profound thoughts with a poetic, mystical, and, one could add, subtle Kabbalistic tenor. Indeed, one of the features of his writing is that he seems quite deliberately careful to camouflage or remove the prospect of creating a direct, indexical significance of what he could be seen to be saying in his writing. Instead of providing textual certainty, Benjamin can sometimes leave his reader with a sense of the mysterious and elusive effect of language and the meaning it can produce.

This panel forefronts the textual ambiguity and uncertainty and seeks creative, innovative, alternative, and/or intertextual dialogues "between the lines" of part or the whole of Benjamin's oeuvre. Welcome approaches would re-read specific essays in Benjamin's work and open up, again, and interrogate the basic questions or problems they pose. For example, in "The Task of the Translator", why does Benjamin finally land in a bottomless abyss where the specific language of an author and their translator opens up to the infinitude of 'pure language'? Or, in "The Arcades Project", to what effect did he so carefully juxtapose the discarded shards of culture into an evocative walk through the arcades of historical debris? And, in "Theses on the Philosophy of History", what does the account of Paul Klee's 'Angelus Novus', amongst images of vanquished Carthagians and victorious ruling Romans, suggest about the way we re-member and re-collect the past?

Other welcome approaches could re-interpret Benjamin's work into contemporary contexts and examine whether his work continues to be relevant. For example, turning to "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin goes to great length to show that the greatest threat facing humanity is fascism, and the most powerful weapon the fascist dictator has is modern technology with its capacity to standardise the production of the artifact and universalise its meaning. But is such a virulent anti-totalitarian critique still relevant in a partial, oversaturated age of new media? And is Benjamin really saying that the 'aura' of the reproduced artifact is irretrievably depleted? So how do contemporary advocates of global democracy respond to his critique of the social bonds and cultural relations produced through reproduced/reproducing objects? Then Benjamin ends the "Mechanical Reproduction" essay by portraying communism as a great liberator of humanity, but who, after 1989, or, in fact, after Sartre after Kruschev, still believes this? Is there something still in old Benjamin's consideration of communism that remains productive? What does Benjamin offer in a post 9/11 world?

In addressing such or other questions, this panel asks whether there is an overarching project in Benjamin's writing, and if there is, whether that project is yet, and is always in need of being articulated?

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to John Grech <[email protected]> by 16th June.

Posted by prolurkr at 10:33 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Interdisciplinary Conference in Women's Studies

Interdisciplinary Conference in Women's Studies
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
February 22-24, 2007

Proposal Information
We invite proposals for individual papers, panels, and other presentation formats such as roundtables, posters, and performances with scholarly and/or activist emphasis, addressing the general conference topic of women's studies or the featured theme of "Performing Gender." Proposals are welcome from all scholarly fields and disciplines, including the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, design, business, sports, and cultural studies.

"Performing Gender" involves a wide spectrum of subjects and approaches. Possible topics might address the following questions. How is gender enacted? How does gender performance-and critique of that performance-affect other aspects of society? What are the consequences of gender performance? What are the implications of race, class, and nationality for gender performance? How do gender performance, sexuality, and sexual orientation intersect? What facets of gender performance remain largely unacknowledged?
How has the backlash against conscious gender performance framed itself? How do various social groups negotiate gender?

Possible topics addressing the theme of "performing gender":

• The Biology, Sociology, and Psychology of Transgender & Transsexuality
• Race, Ethnicity, and Class in the Performance of Gender
• Media Genders
• Globalizing Gender: International Gender Performances
• Performing Queer Gender
• Marketing and Advertising: The Commodification of Gender
• Gender Identity in the Visual Arts
• Science and the Study of Gender Performance
• Corporate Genders: Doing Business, Doing Self
• Sports and Gender Performance
• Cyborgs, Cyberspace and Cybersex: Performing Gender Online
• Children, the Family, and Gender Performance
• Performing Gender and Medicine: Illness and Etiology
• Gendered Language and Speech Performance
• Gender and War
• The Theater of Gender Performance
• Performing the Academy: Gender in the Classroom
• Literary Genders: Performance in/and the Text
• Fashion and Gender Performance
• Presentations and Representations of the Gendered Self
• Feminism and Gender
• Religion and Gender Performance
• Gender Performance and Ecology
• The Ethics of Performing Gender
• Politics of/and Gender Performance
• Voyeurism: Watching Gender Performance

Proposals for 18-20-minute individual presentations and for posters should be 250-500 words, with working bibliography. Panel proposals should include 250-500 word abstracts and bibliographies for each presentation (2-3 per panel). Workshop and performance proposals (up to one hour in length) should include a description of purpose, form, and content. Include name, contact information, and a brief c.v. with all proposals.

All materials should be postmarked or received by email/fax by September 1, 2006.

Send proposals to
Elyce Rae Helford, Conference Chair
Women's Studies Program, Box 498
Middle Tennessee State University
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
telephone: (615) 898-5910 fax: (615) 898-5289
email: [email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 11:50 PM | TrackBack

CFP - The Archive, the Book, and the Library

The Archive, the Book, and the Library
Proposed Panel for Modernist Studies Association 8 (2006)
October 19-22, 2006, Tulsa, OK

This panel seeks proposals on modernist critiques of (and experimentation with) the technology and institutions of the book. In what ways did modernist authors and movements address the material manifestations of literature, both old and emerging, in an effort to "make it new"? Papers might address the relationship between print and manuscript, the role of the printing press, the relationship between modernist authors and publishers, booksellers, libraries, and universities, the use of the typewriter, methods of reading, and experimental or utopian bookmaking.

Some examples might include: Pound's advocation of a "loose-leaf" system instead of bound anthologies, to keep the best material in front; the influence of late 19th-century sentence diagrams on modernist poetry (e.g., Stein, Williams); the burning of the library in Williams's *Paterson*; avant-garde (especially Futurist and Constructivist) experimentation with printing and typesets; Olson's use of the typewriter (or O'Hara's use of the telephone) and other new technologies; and other related topics.

Please send a maximum 500-word abstract along with a brief bio/CV to Timothy Carmody at [email protected] by April 20. Inquiries welcome.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:42 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Technoculture A Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities

Technoculture - A Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities

Guest Editors:
Dr. Keith Dorwick, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Dr. Kevin Moberly, North Carolina Wesleyan College

For a special issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities (IH), guest editors Keith Dorwick and Kevin Moberly seek papers from a broad a range of academic disciplines that focus on issues that could be briefly summed as "technology and society," or, perhaps, "technologies and societies."

IH is published by the National Association for Humanities Education and is a refereed scholarly journal, published twice a year. Potential authors should note that this issue has been accepted for publication already; we will not need to find a publisher.

Successful papers for this special issue should focus on the ways humanists read technology in a range of historical periods and of academic and artistic disciplines as the subject of their work or as a special case of cultural studies.

Topics for this special issue could include depictions of technologies that treat a wide range of subjects related to the humanities. These subjects might include:

• literature, film, theater, and television as technologies;
• the cultural impact of technology on particular cultures or subcultures;
• technology and its affect on the production of contemporary/historical artistic works and/or the work of artists;
• technology as the dream (or nightmare) that drives novelists, poets, artists, playwrights and essayists to their notebooks, brushes, canvasses, stages and screens;
• the economics of technology in the humanities;
• computer/video gaming;
• hypertext (especially hypertext and the arts or literature);
• the dissemination of the arts via technology to broad or to specialized audiences;
• the death of the book;
• the myth of the "death of the book";
• the disappearance of a given technology or technologies and what that disappearance/disappearances means/mean for the archival issues that surround the humanities.

In particular, the special editors are interested in a conception of "technology" and the "humanist impulse" that pushes beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers; we seek papers that deal with any technology or technologies in any number of historical periods from any relevant theoretical perspective. We are not interested in "how to" pedagogical papers that deal with the use of technology in the classroom.

We hope to publish mainly scholarly/critical papers in citation styles relevant to the home discipline of their authors, but creative works including poetry and creative non-fiction are also of interest to us. We also publish art work and are seeking original art (grayscale or line drawings and full color art for the front and back cover) that explores the role of technology in our lives.

Inquiries are welcome, though, again, only full manuscripts will be considered for possible inclusion in this special issue.

Please submit article proposals/abstracts by May 15, 2006. The editors will then request full length drafts from those abstracts still under consideration. Length: 20-25 double-spaced manuscript pages and creative works in any genre to BOTH [email protected] and [email protected] in Word or RTF format for consideration by 05/15/06; requests to review relevant books on this topic may be sent to both addresses as well.

Calendar:

• Article Proposals/Abstracts Due: May 15, 2006.
• Requests for Full Length Drafts from Editors to Authors: June 1, 2006
• Full Drafts to Editors for Comment: Sept 15, 2006.
• Final drafts due to the guest editors: Dec 15, 2006.
• Final proofed text delivered to the journal editor with front and back (color) illustrations, Jan 15, 2007.
• Publication April or May 2007.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - The MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning

My email has been hit regularly in the last 12-hours with the announcement that The New Media Consortium and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, working in collaboration with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation will be publishing a series of edited volumes looking at the intersection of digital media and learning.

Ok that is enough to catch my eyes but the listed honorarium made them pop out of my head - $10,000. WOW $10,000 for the stuff I write anyway, ok well mostly the same stuff since this will be much more competitive than even a journal submission...but it is my topic anyway. So I'm going through the unpublished work looking at what can be reconfigured to meet their requirements, and work that can be reconfigured very quickly. I couldn't find the full call online so I am hosting the pdf file I received with details. Take a moment to read The MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.

The New Media Consortium and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, working in collaboration with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are soliciting abstracts for chapters to appear in a series of volumes entitled The MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. The MacArthur Foundation Series will explore the intersection of digital media and learning from the perspectives of experts, visionaries, and thought leaders chosen from across the globe. Authors whose chapters are selected for inclusion in these volumes will receive an honorarium for their contribution.

The working hypothesis of the effort is that digital media tools have advanced significantly in recent years, enabling new forms of knowledge production, social networking, communication, and play. People who have grown up with access to these new digital tools are engaged in an unprecedented exploration of language, games, social interaction, and self-directed education that can be used to support learning. They are different as a result of this exposure to and use of digital media and these differences are reflected in their sense of self, and how they express their independence and creativity, and in their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systemically.

Six volumes of such work will be published in the first year of the MacArthur Foundation Series, each with a unifying theme that addresses a critical aspect of this emerging field of study. The themes are Identity and Digital Media, Credibility, Digital Media and Civic Engagement, the Ecology of Games, Incidental Learning and Unexpected Outcomes, and Race and Ethnicity. These volumes are intended for an informed but wide audience. Each volume will include an introductory chapter by the editor, and 7-10 additional chapters that will explore the topics from a variety of perspectives. A summary of each topic is attached.

Authors for the volumes will be chosen in a competitive process, with selections based on a peer review of an abstract of their proposed chapter. Submissions of abstracts are due April 28, 2006. Abstracts will be reviewed by a panel of scholars who will base their selections on the relevance of the content to the planned volume on the topic, the conceptual underpinnings and quality of the ideas represented in the abstract, the publication record or relevant expertise of the author in this area, and other related factors.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:55 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Summer 2006 Fellowship Call for Proposals

Summer 2006 Fellowship Call for Proposals

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular the University of Southern California?s Institute for Multimedia Literacy is pleased to announce a third annual Fellowship program for summer 2006 to foster innovative research for its digital publishing venture, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular.

First launched in 2005, Vectors is an international electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. Moving well beyond the text-with-pictures format of much electronic scholarly publishing, Vectors brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures social and cultural
relations.

Vectors adheres to the highest standards of quality in a strenuously reviewed format. The journal is edited by Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, with Creative Directors Erik Loyer and Raegan Kelly and Lead Programmer Craig Dietrich, and is guided by the collective knowledge of a prestigious international board.

About the Fellowships

Vectors Fellowships will be awarded to up to eight individuals or teams of collaborators in the early to mid- stages of development of a scholarly multimedia project related to the themes of Difference or Memory. Completed projects will be included in Volume 3 of the journal in 2007. Vectors features next-generation multimedia scholarship, publishing work that can only be realized in an online format.

Volume Three, Issue One: Difference
From Charles Babbage's 19th century "Difference Engine" to Derrida's 1980s neographism "Différance," the notion of difference has served as a provocative metaphor for thinking about language, culture, politics, technology and identity. This issue of Vectors encourages diverse examinations of the notion of difference as it plays out in a variety of cultural spheres, discourses and practices. We are interested in a broadly-conceived notion of difference, one that engages technology and culture or that might be productively examined through the format of an interactive multimedia journal. In particular, we seek proposals that foreground the cultural or political manifestations of racial, gender, national, religious, ethnic, geographic, technological or economic differences.

Possible areas of investigation include but are not limited to:

• historical and future conceptions of difference
• rethinking otherness, multi-culturalism, convergence
• technologies of difference
• legacies + limits of 1990s theories and manifestations of difference
• sounding out difference(s)
• afro-futurism, speculative differences, future species
• sameness and/or difference, the logics of both/and
• rethinking identity; difference/multiplicity/fragmentation
• post-Katrina, post-9/11, post-racism
• post-feminist gender differences
• war and ethnic/religious differences
• economic disparity and cultural differences

Volume Three, Issue Two: Memory

Jean Luc Godard's dictum that "only the hand that erases can write" underscores the ironic and contradictory status of memory in postmodern culture. In an age when both history and memory are routinely characterized as being at an end, it is more important than ever to closely examine the epistemological precepts and rhetorical strategies by which we engage, remember and speak about the past. This issue of Vectors explores a range of possible frameworks for thinking about memory as a phenomenon that is fundamentally entangled with the discourses of competing disciplines, political imperatives and cultural contexts. We are particularly interested in proposals that engage the eccentric, disruptive and dynamic potentials of memory as it relates to history, media, technology, and/or the sciences.

Possible areas of investigation include but are not limited to:

• the impact of proliferating technological and prosthetic forms of memory
• scientific and medical visualization
• visual memory, media and popular culture memories
• memorialization, reminiscence, recall
• the role of nostalgia, desire, psychology and narrative
• amnesia, displacement, erasure, regeneration
• the dynamic interplay of remembering and forgetting; "creative forgetting," "active forgetting"
• memory as practice, process and ritual
• reconstruction, reenactment, rescripting and remixing of memories
• counter-memory, chaos and resistance
• discontinuous, fragmentary or disruptive visions of the past
• individual vs. social, cultural and popular memory

About the Awards

All fellowship recipients will participate in a one-week residency June 19-23, 2006 at USC?s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where they will have access to state of the art production facilities. Fellows work in collaboration with world-class designers and Vectors' technical support and programming team throughout the project?s development, typically during a span of 3-5 months. The residency will include colloquia and working sessions where participants will have the chance to develop project foundations and collectively engage relevant issues in scholarly multimedia. Applicants need not be proficient with new media authoring, but must demonstrate familiarity with the potentials of digital media forms. Evidence of the capacity for successful collaboration and for scholarly innovation is required. Fellowship awards will include an honorarium of $1500 for each participant or team of collaborators, in addition
to travel and accommodation expenses.

About the Proposals

We are seeking project proposals that creatively address issues related to the themes of Difference and Memory. While the format of the journal is meant to explore innovative modes of multimedia scholarship, we are not necessarily looking for projects that are about new media. Rather, we are interested in the various ways that 'old' and 'new' technologies suggest a transformation of scholarship, art and communication practices and their relevance to everyday life in an unevenly mediated world.

Applicants are encouraged to think beyond the computer screen to consider possibilities created by the proliferation of wireless technology, handheld devices, alternative exhibition venues, etc. Projects may translate existing scholarly work or be entirely conceived for new media. We are particularly interested in projects that re-imagine the role of the user and seek to reach broader publics. Work that creatively explores innovations in interactivity, cross-disciplinary collaboration, or scholarly applications for newly developing scientific or engineering technologies are also encouraged.

Proposals should include the following

• Title of project and a one-sentence description
• A 3-5 page description of the project concept, goals and outcome. This description should address questions of audience; innovative uses of interactivity, address and form. Please also detail the project?s argument and its contribution to multimedia scholarship and, more generally, to contemporary scholarship in your field.
• Brief biography of each applicant, including relevant qualifications and experience for this fellowship
• Full CV for each applicant
• Anticipated required resources (design, technical, hardware, software, exhibition, etc.)
• Projected timeline for project development
• Sample media if available (CD, DVD, VHS (any standard), or NTSC Mini-DV); for electronic submissions, URLs are preferred but still images may be sent as e-mail attachments if necessary)

Projects that articulate a clear understanding of the value of multimedia to their execution will be the most successful. Take seriously the questions "Why does this project need to be realized in multimedia? What is to be gained by the use of a rich media format for the argument or experience I aim to present?"

Electronic applications are preferred. Please submit to: [email protected]

Mailing address
Vectors Summer Fellowships
Annenberg Center for Communication
746 W. Adams Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90089-7727

Priority will be given to applications received by April 15, 2006. Fellowship recipients will be notified in May 2006.

Additional Information

For additional information about Vectors and the Vectors Summer Fellowship
Program, please visit http://www.vectorsjournal.org
Questions may be directed to Tara McPherson [email protected] or Steve Anderson [email protected]

Posted by prolurkr at 05:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP- Visiting Research Fellowships: The Meaning of the New Networked Age

Visiting Research Fellowships: The Meaning of the New Networked Age
Annenberg Center for Communication
University of Southern California

The Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) (www.annenberg.edu) at the University of Southern California invites applications for up to eight postdoctoral positions and one visiting scholar position. These Visiting Research fellows will take part in a major multi-disciplinary research initiative to explore the "The Meaning of the New Networked Age: Innovation, Content, Society, and Policy." We welcome researchers from various disciplines including anthropology, architecture, the arts, business, communications, computer science, design, economics, engineering, history, international relations, law, library science, neurosciences, political science, rhetoric, and sociology.

ACC is a research institute devoted to the study of new media from a multi-disciplinary perspective. We are in a period of fundamental transformation in the nature of the networks that connect people, information, objects, and locations. But, what does it mean and what, if anything, should be done to guide the process? The ACC research program will explore the drivers of these changes, their meaning, and their implications for business and government policy. The 2006-2007 theme investigates the structure and evolution of today's political, social, cultural, technological, and knowledge networks.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• How new technology is transforming politics and citizen engagement worldwide,
• Communication law and policy
• New models of intellectual discourse and citation,
• Peer-to-peer cultural production and distribution,
• The emergence of pervasive mobile and wireless networks.

The ACC intends to convene a multi-disciplinary cohort of scholars to focus on a topic of pressing concern not well addressed in more established disciplinary and departmental institutions. The visiting fellows will work with the ACC's senior fellows and also will be expected to pursue their research in residence at the Annenberg Center during the 2006-2007 academic year. They will collectively be responsible for organizing one conference and a monthly speakers series, and to attend two weekly Fellows' seminars of graduate, postdoctoral,
and faculty fellows on the theme of the meaning of the new networked age. They may not hold any other appointment during the period of the fellowship.

The postdoctoral fellowship is intended for scholars who have completed their Ph.D since 2001, but we also will consider researchers with at least four years of relevant, real- world experience. The ACC fellowship carries a stipend of $45,000 in addition to a limited amount of funds to support research and relocation expenses.

The visiting scholar position is intended for a mid-career scholar with a well -established track record and demonstrated leadership and expertise related to the theme. The stipend will be commensurate with the scholar's current position. ACC will also provide a limited amount of funds to support research and relocation expenses.

Applicants should clearly indicate whether they are applying for a postdoctoral position or the visiting scholar position. Applications should include a CV, a cover letter including a personal statement, and a brief statement of research goals in relation to the theme. Three letters of recommendation are to be sent directly by the writers (letters may also be faxed to 213-747-4981).

Address all application materials to

Elizabeth Harmon, Annenberg Center for Communication,
University of Southern California, 734 West Adams Boulevard, Los
Angeles, CA 90089-7725. Email contact: [email protected] The
deadline for receipt in our office is April 30, 2006.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:47 PM | TrackBack

CFP - International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (ISSOTL)

ISSOTL is an excellent place to learn about teaching and research issues in the scholarship of teaching and learning. When you read the call, pay particular attention to "The Synthesizer Role," sounds like blogging to me. *S*

Call for Proposals

The objective of the meetings of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is to bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners to discuss research issues and experience in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The conference will feature invited talks, panel discussions, poster presentations, and working sessions.

Theme: "Making a Greater Difference: Connecting to Transformational Agendas"

Increasing the vitality of the scholarship of teaching and learning depends on the strength of its linkages with larger systems of change. These linkages matter in reciprocal ways: the influence of systems on individual choices of inquiries into teaching and learning and the ways in which those inquiries can have impact beyond individual practice.

The ISSOTL 2006 Conference theme emphasizes how the scholarship of teaching and learning connects with broader currents of transformation. Possibilities include current research in the learning sciences, dialogue around issues of social justice and student ethical development, growing imperatives for globally-conscious education, current approaches to disciplines and interdisciplinary thinking, new modes of teaching and learning through digital technologies, and governmental interests in accountability. These broader currents in turn help shape the role of the scholarship of teaching and learning within the multiple contexts in which we work: classrooms, institutions, disciplines and professions, communities, and local and national educational policy spheres.

The conference solicits papers, posters, and sessions that address these connections in two directions: How do broader currents of change in education influence how the scholarship of teaching and learning gets practiced, developed, and promoted? And conversely, how does the scholarship of teaching and learning make a difference in multiple educational contexts and explicitly contribute to broader agendas? Proposals that deal directly with the idea of making a difference--on learning, on teaching practice, on colleagues, on policy at various levels--will be given priority.

Within the conference theme, we invite proposals for presentations and workshops within one of these three tracks.

Tracks

1. Theory and Practice: Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Proposals that address approaches to teaching and learning in the disciplines, learning issues that cross disciplines, linkages between theory and practice, approaches to preparing for and developing the scholarship of teaching and learning.

2. Tools and Processes: Understanding Methods of Inquiry and Dissemination

Proposals that investigate, critique, and model methodologies, data analysis, interpretation of findings, ethical issues, dissemination practices, and methods of sharing findings.

3. Broader Impact: Influencing Multiple Contexts

Proposals that explore strategies for making rigorous work on teaching and learning visible and useful for different audiences and for connecting the scholarship of teaching and learning to emerging policy directions, disciplines and professions, collaborative networks, and modes of institutional commitment to the scholarship of teaching and learning (e.g. strategic research plans or leadership action plans).

Presentation Formats

Presentation and Dialogue: Single presentations will employ work in the scholarship of teaching and learning as a way of opening up dialogue with conferees. Each presentation will have a MAXIMUM of 20 minutes. The program committee will group single presentations into panels of two with a total presentation time, including questions and dialogue, of 60 minutes, or three with a total time of 75 minutes. One of the presenters will be designated as a facilitator. Sessions will also have a synthesizer, assigned by the program committee.

Poster: A designated session will enable poster presenters to share their intellectual work in person. The presenter must be present during the period assigned for discussion. Posters may have up to two presenting authors to be listed in the program (although multiple authors may be listed on the poster itself).

Panel and Dialogue: Organized panel sessions of 75 minutes will consist of two or three presenters. Another person may be designated to serve as facilitator and synthesizer. Proposals for organized panels should be submitted by the panel organizer and must include an abstract describing the rationale for the panel as a whole AND an individual summary and abstract for each presentation. Panel abstracts will be evaluated for each individual and for the panel as a whole.

Working Sessions: A Working Session of 75 minutes long focuses on interactive development and discussion of ideas (rather than on presentations) and results in a product consisting of a written record or distillation of the discussion useful for others. This written product will be posted on the ISSOTL website as part of the conference proceedings. The proposal should identify the Working Session "leader" and "featured discussants." A synthesizer may be designated in the proposal or can be assigned by the program committee. The program committee is especially interested in proposals around the following topics: organizing campuses or curricular programs to support the scholarship of teaching and learning, linking the learning sciences to SoTL, going public with SoTL through writing for different publishing venues, integrating SoTL professional development into graduate programs, establishing collaborative structures for advancing SoTL, and making SoTL understandable and useful for policy makers.

The Synthesizer Role

A new feature of ISSOTL2006 is the role of synthesizer as a formal part of the program. A synthesizer participates in a session and produces a compact written analysis of the session for posting on the Conference site as part of the proceedings. Individuals may apply to be a synthesizer and will be assigned to a session by the program committee. Panels and Working Sessions may name a synthesizer in their proposal, and should clearly designate the synthesizer role when doing so. An individual serving as a synthesizer may also serve in another presenting role. Computers and uploading capabilities will be available onsite in the Commons at ISSOTL 2006 for synthesizers who wish to post their syntheses during the conference.

May 1, 2006 Proposal submission deadline
July 1, 2006 Notification (email) sent to the submission's primary contact informing them of acceptance or rejection
August 15, 2006 Deadline for submitter to confirm acceptance of invitation to present
October 1, 2006 Early registration ends
November 9, 2006 Conference begins
November 12, 2006 Conference concludes

Posted by prolurkr at 04:39 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Reception Studies (Special Topic Session)

Reception Studies (Special Topic Session)
Midwest Modern Language Association Convention
November 9-12
Palmer House Hilton
Chicago, Illinois

This session is offered in conjunction with the Reception Study Society. It focuses on the relationship between texts and readers, real or implied. Particularly appropriate are papers on designations, assumptions or practices regarding the elevated or lowly nature of texts and readers, as well as crossing, blurring or complicating those binary categories. However, papers on any aspect of reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, and feminist, black, ethnic, gay, and postcolonial versions of these fields are welcome.

Send 250 word abstracts to westg@ferris.edu. Deadline: April 15.

Genevieve West, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Languages and Literature
Ferris State University

Posted by prolurkr at 09:51 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Special JSPR Issue on Personality and Personal Relationship Processes

Call for Papers - Special JSPR Issue on Personality and Personal Relationship Processes

Guest Editor: Stanley O. Gaines, Jr., School of Social Sciences and Law, Brunel University (United Kingdom).

The term "personality" covers a wide range of individual-difference variables outside the domain of cognitive ability. In his interpersonal theory of personality, Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) argued that personality cannot be properly understood outside the context of personal relationships in which individuals are embedded. However, during the decades that have passed since Sullivan described personality as inherently interpersonal, studies examining the impact of personality variables on personal relationship processes have not kept pace with studies examining the impact of social-psychological variables on personal relationship processes.

The objective of this special JSPR issue is to bring together several cutting-edge studies of personality influences on personal relationship processes, within a single edition. Both original research reports and summaries of research programs will be considered. Topics are likely to include (but are not necessarily limited to) traits, motives, moods, emotions, attitudes, and values as influences on personal relationship processes. Given the multidisciplinary nature of scholarship in JSPR (and, indeed, scholarship in the field of personal relationships), the guest editor extends an invitation to all scholars - whether from psychology or communication studies, sociology or family studies, or other academic domains - who work with personality variables.

Submission Information: Manuscripts should be electronically submitted directly to the guest editor (acknowledgement will be sent upon receipt of manuscripts):

Stanley O. Gaines, Jr. (e-mail: sogainesjr@yahoo.com )

Please submit one copy in Word format with author names, affiliations and contact information (identifying information should be limited to the title page). Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. Reviewing and selection of papers for publication will be carried out according to the standards of JSPR. Authors should consult the general instructions for authors at the following Web address: http://www.sagepub.com/journalManuscript.aspx?pid=47&sc=1

The submission deadline is May 1, 2006.

It is anticipated that the special issue will be published in 2007.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:06 PM | TrackBack

CFP - MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities

The MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (http://www.mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/wph) is a new electronic publication forum intended to allow researchers to present initial findings or hypotheses such as might, at a more advanced stage, become eligible for publication in established scholarly journals. As such it will be of particular interest to postgraduate researchers, though established scholars are also invited to submit papers.

Submissions for the first issue of the Working Papers, to be published in October 2006, are invited on any topic, but the editorial panel aims to choose half of the papers from submissions that relate to the theme of 'Youth and Age'. Authors might consider, among other things: the cultural construction and symbolization of youth and age (e.g. notions of 'young blood', coming of age, seniority); the role these terms play in constructions of gender, ethnicity, etc.; the symbolization of political or artistic succession in terms of youth and age (e.g. 'the old guard' / 'young Turks'); and the privileging, in cultural discourses about generational succession, of the male 'line' over female-female and mixed-gender relations. Authors may also want to dismantle the opposition youth / age to consider more complex models of life stages.

Papers may come from any field in the 'modern humanities', which includes the modern and medieval languages, literatures, and cultures of Europe (including English and the Slavonic languages, and the cultures of the European diaspora). History, library studies, education and pedagogical subjects, and the medical application of linguistics are excluded.

THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 1ST MAY 2006.

Any questions can be directed to the editors at postgrads@mhra.org.uk

About the MHRA (www.mhra.org.uk):

The MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) plays a major role in promoting academic endeavour in the modern humanities by facilitating the publication of original scholarly work of the highest standard.

As well as publishing scholarly articles (in print and electronic form), the Association supports scholarly publishing projects including postgraduate work http://www.mhra.org.uk/Membership/PostgradMembership.html). It plays a major role in peer review, maintaining the highest editorial standards and supporting breadth of approach.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:21 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Doctoral Colloquium AoIR 2006

DOCTORAL COLLOQUIUM
Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Annual Conference 2006, Brisbane, Australia

The AoIR 7.0 Doctoral Colloquium offers PhD students working in internet research or a related field a special forum on 27 Sep 2006 where they will have a chance to present their research plans and discuss them with peers and established senior researchers. Interested students should prepare a 2 page summary of their research. This should provide a context for the research, describe the methods being used, the progress to date with a focus on issues and concerns, as well as the expectations and hopes from the colloquium.

Please submit your 2 page application by 1 April 2006 to: Marcus Foth at m.foth@qut.edu.au

PhD students are encouraged to submit an application for the Doctoral Colloquium (by 1 April) as well as a paper for the AoIR conference (by 21 Feb) if they wish. Applicants will be notified of acceptance to the Doctoral Colloquium by 1 June 2006. Successful applicants will be asked to prepare an 8 page report on their research by 1 August 2006. It will be distributed to all Doctoral Colloquium attendees to prepare for an informed discussion, Q&A and feedback from the chairs on the day. All attendees of the Doctoral Colloquium are required to register for the AoIR conference.

For further details please visit the conference website at http://conferences.aoir.org/ or contact the convenor of the AoIR Doctoral Colloquium, Marcus Foth, at m.foth@qut.edu.au

Chairs:
Barbara Adkins, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Nancy Baym, University of Kansas, USA
Steve Jones, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Randolph Kluver, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Host and Sponsor:
Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology

Posted by prolurkr at 04:18 PM | TrackBack

CFP - CREATIVE ETHICAL PROBLEM SOLVING IN HUMAN RESEARCH: Challenges and Solutions for Researchers and Ethics Committees

CREATIVE ETHICAL PROBLEM SOLVING IN HUMAN RESEARCH:
Challenges and Solutions for Researchers and Ethics Committees
Conference - July 28, 2006, San Francisco Bay Area

What can be done with research ideas that seem ethically and scientifically sound but that are innovative and might not be compliant with regulations? A conference described at
http://www.csueastbay.edu/JERHRE/conference/index.html will answer that question. At the conference, unconventional new research practices that deserve to be tested, but that raise regulatory and ethical concerns in some quarters, will be examined by a panel of experts, including Dr. Bernard Schwetz, Director of the U.S. Office of Human Research Protection. Regulatory-compliant protocols for experimenting with those innovative research ideas be developed and publicized.

Be in time for early-bird rates. Deadline for submitting abstracts: April 15, 2006. FULL CASES due by May 15, 2006

CALL FOR CASE ABSTRACTS

Cases are descriptions, up to 500 words long, of a scientific and ethical problem you or others sought to solve, the barriers to such research, and any solutions attempted or considered. Cases will fall into two main categories: successful cases (innovative research ultimately approved by an IRB/RERB and carried out), and cases that were stymied for some reason in the planning stage. Both are encouraged. (See Examples of Case Topics.)

Abstracts of cases are preliminary submissions of up to 200 words in length due by April 15. Abstracts will be evaluated for appropriateness, and accepted abstracts are to be developed into full cases by May 15 . Related sets of cases will be allocated to panel members for their review prior to the conference.

Please submit case abstracts to joan.sieber@csueastbay.edu

Submission of Abstracts: Please submit your abstract in the illustrated in the following sample format, using the Online Abstract Template (doc).

Example of Abstract

Author: Mary Doe, University of Atlantis, mary.doe@uatlantis.edu, (510) 333-4444

Tentative Title: Interviewing Involuntarily Committed Mentally Ill Persons

Main issue(s) involved: vulnerability, privacy

Brief description of case: Care givers need to understand the experience of being committed to psychiatric care (involuntarily) by one's family, in order to best serve this population. Interviews conducted shortly after being admitted to psychiatric care, with follow up interviews until time of release, would provide useful insights into the experience and needs of this population; and there is some evidence that such interviews would have therapeutic value. Informal conversation with such patients has revealed that they would greatly welcome an opportunity to discuss their experience and feelings about being involuntarily committed. However, IRBs/RERBs opine that such interviews would unacceptably invade privacy and exacerbate negative feelings. An opportunity to conduct such interviews and assess subjects' responses to this experience in debriefing and follow up interviews would make it possible to evaluate this risk/benefit assessment.

Posted by prolurkr at 08:53 PM | TrackBack

CFP - MLA The Talk of the Town: Gossip, News, and Secrets

This panel invites writers to consider how gossip and its related forms negotiate the distance between high and low culture and public and private spheres. Does gossip function as a conservative or subversive force? What happens when scandalous talk circulates in print? How do "high" literary genres (such as biography) mimic the content or strategies of "low" forms (such as scandal sheets)? Does gossip function as a trope or a threat for authorship? How can scandal be commodified--as news, talk shows, published diaries, scandal sheets, even blackmail? When a secret becomes public knowledge, whose story is it? We hope these questions serve as a springboard to generate papers from many theoretical positions and historical periods.

Please send a 500-word abstract to Dr. Paula Reiter, Mount Mary College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), reiterp@mtmary.edu by April 15, 2006.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:48 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Darwinian Perspectives on Electronic Communication

Darwinian Perspectives on Electronic Communication
A Special Issue of the Journal:
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
http://cits.tamiu.edu/ieeetpc/

Guest Editor:
Ned Kock, Texas A&M International University http://www.tamiu.edu/~nedkock/

Guest Associate Editors:
Donald Hantula, Temple University
Stephen Hayne, Colorado State University
Gad Saad, Concordia University
Peter Todd, Indiana University at Bloomington
Richard Watson, University of Georgia

IEEE TPC Editor:
Kim S. Campbell, University of Alabama

Topics:
The list below includes possible topics to be explored from a Darwinian
perspective for this Special Issue:

• Online consumer behavior on the Web.
• Electronic mating behavior, such as in Internet dating.
• Deception identification through electronic communication media.
• "Foraging" behavior by online consumers.
• Media naturalness and cognitive effort in complex group tasks.
• Trust building through electronic communication media.
• Information overload induced by Web interface design choices.
• "Flashbulb memorization" and surprise-enhanced computer-mediated learning.
• Compensatory adaptation and online learning.
• Vertical distortion and the design of electronic communication interfaces.

The topics above are not a comprehensive list of all possible topics for this Special Issue. They are provided here for illustration purposes only. Much related research has been conducted in various fields of inquiry that can serve as a basis for authors of submissions to this Special Issue. Authors are encouraged to draw on ideas from the following fields of inquiry (and related fields) while working on their submissions: sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, biological anthropology, and (to a certain extent) ethology.

Submissions to this Special Issue should address the topics above (as well as other related topics) explicitly from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective. For example, submissions addressing the topic of information overload in Web-based communication from a cognitive science perspective, but not explicitly building on a Darwinian evolutionary basis, will fall
outside the scope of this Special Issue.

Important dates:
Below are tentative dates for all the main steps involved in the production
and publication of the Special Issue:

• August 1, 2006: All submissions are due to the Guest Editor.
• October 15, 2006: Decisions and review comments are sent to authors.
• January 1, 2007: Revised and resubmitted manuscripts are sent back out for review.
• March 1, 2007: Final decision letters are sent to authors.
• April 1, 2007: Final manuscripts are sent to Editor for pre-publication editing.
• June 15, 2007: Special Issue goes to IEEE for publication.
• August 1, 2007: Proofs go to authors.
• September 1, 2007: Special Issue is published.

Submission guidelines:
All submissions must be in English, and should represent the original work of the authors. Improved versions of papers previously published in conference proceedings are welcome, provided that no copyright limitations exist. Submissions must be made electronically via e-mail to the Guest Editor (using one of the e-mail addresses below). The manuscript should be
included as an attachment in MS Word or RTF format.

Preferred e-mail address for submission:
nedkock@stx.rr.com

Alternative e-mail address for submission:
nedkock@tamiu.edu

Manuscripts should ideally be between 4000 and 6000 words in length.

Submissions should include the following:

1. In the subject of the e-mail message: the text "IEEE TPC submission by:" followed by the last names of the co-authors - e.g., "IEEE TPC Submission by: Rodriguez, Choi, and Wright".
2. In the body of the e-mail message, for each author: Name, university/organization affiliation, e-mail, mailing address, and phone/fax numbers. Please indicate who the contact author for the submission is.
3. Also in the body of the e-mail message: the names and full contact information of at least two suggested reviewers, who should be "neutral" (e.g., no former advisors or students please), followed by a statement to the effect that there is no conflict of interest between the suggested reviewers and any of the co-authors.
4. In the manuscript submission: Submission title, an abstract of the submission, keywords, the main body of the submission, and references. Please do not include the names of the authors in the manuscript, or any information that would allow for their identification. Reviews will be blind.

The submission review process will be managed through e-mail. The receipt of submissions will be quickly confirmed by e-mail. Submissions should follow the bibliography style guidelines for IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (see URL below), or the APA referencing style. All accepted submissions will have to comply with the bibliography style guidelines for IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. http://ieeepcs.org/activities_publications_transactions.php Information on camera-ready copy preparation will be provided to authors upon acceptance.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:35 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Autobiography PAMLA

CFP: Autobiography (03/15/06; PAMLA, 11/10/06-11/11/06)
Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference (PAMLA)
November 10-11, 2006
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA
Submission Deadline: March 15, 2006

**Panel Topic: Autobiography**
Paper proposals are requested for a standing panel of the PAMLA conference. The panel is open to any topic related to lifewriting. Please e-mail a 500-word proposal and a 50-word abstract (in the body of the message body or as an attachment) to anita.duneer@uconn.edu . Please include your name, institutional affiliation, and preferred contact information with your proposal.

Conference website with details and membership information: www.pamla.org

Posted by prolurkr at 04:40 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Centre for Social Theory and Design Conference

Centre for Social Theory and Design Conference

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity

August 17-19 2006

Call for Papers

Walter Benjamin's work remains central to discussions of modernity within the Humanities, Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. This conference will bring together scholars working on all aspects of Benjamin's work as well as those who deploy the insights of that work in developing projects of their own.

Abstracts, which will be subject to a refereeing process, should be sent to walterbenjamin@uts.edu.au by April 30 2006.

Confirmed Key Note Speakers:
Carol Jacobs (Yale University)
Gyorgy Markus (University of Sydney)
Winfried Menninghaus (Freie University)
Henry Sussman (Yale University)

Organizing Committee: Professor Andrew Benjamin, Dr Tara Forrest, Dr Charles Rice (Centre for Social Theory and Design. University of Technology Sydney.)

Posted by prolurkr at 04:15 PM | TrackBack

CFP - HICSS Eighth Annual Minitrack on Persistent Conversation

Eighth Annual Minitrack on Persistent Conversation
Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS 40)
Hilton Waikola Village Resort , Big Island, Hawaii
January 3-6, 2007

The Persistent Conversation minitrack and workshop is a yearly
gathering of those who design and study systems that support
computer-mediated communication. [online: http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC.html ]

== AT A GLANCE ===

= Summary of Topic =

Persistent conversations occur via instant messaging, text and voice chat, email, blogs, wikis, web boards, MOOs, graphical VR environments, document annotation systems, text messaging on mobile phones, etc. Such forms of conversation play a crucial role in domains such as online communities, the sharing and management of knowledge, and the support of e-commerce, e-learning and other network mediated interactions. The persistence of digitally mediated conversation affords new uses (e.g., searching, replaying, restructuring) and raises new problems. This multi-disciplinary minitrack seeks contributions from researchers and designers that improve our ability to understand, analyze, and/or design persistent
conversation systems.

= Who =

Researchers and designers from fields such as anthropology, computer-mediated communication, HCI, interaction design, linguistics, management, psychology, rhetoric, sociology, and
so forth. We also welcome submissions from graduate students.

= Chairs =

Thomas Erickson, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (snowfall@acm.org )
Susan Herring, School of Library and Information Science,
Indiana University (herring@indiana.edu)

= Important Dates* =

Fri, Mar 31, 2006: Abstract submission
Fri, Apr 14, 2006: Feedback on abstracts
Th, June 1, 2006: Paper submission - [Instructions will be on the HICSS site]
Tu, Aug 15, 2006: Accept/Conditional Accept/Reject notice
To be determined: Resubmission of Conditional Accept papers -
Fri Sep 15, 2006: Final publication-ready papers due -
Fri Sep 15, 2006: One author must register for HICSS -
----------
* For other dates, such as end of early registration and hotel
deadlines, see the official HICSS conference site

=== DETAILS ===

= About the Minitrack =

This interdisciplinary minitrack and workshop brings designers and researchers together to explore persistent conversation, the transposition of ordinarily ephemeral conversation into the potentially persistent digital medium. The phenomena of interest include human-to-human interactions carried out using chat, instant messaging, text messaging, email, blogs, wikis, mailing lists, newsgroups, bulletin board systems, multi-authored Web documents, structured conversation systems, textual and graphical virtual worlds, etc. Computer-mediated conversations blend characteristics of oral conversation with those of written text: they may be synchronous or asynchronous; their audience may be small or vast; they may be highly structured or almost amorphous; etc. The persistence of such conversations gives them the potential to be searched, browsed, replayed, annotated, visualized, restructured, and recontextualized, thus opening the door to a variety of new uses and practices.

The particular aim of the minitrack and workshop is to bring together researchers who analyze existing computer-mediated conversational practices and sites, with designers who propose, implement, or deploy new types of conversational systems. By bringing together participants from such diverse areas as anthropology, computer-mediated communication, HCI, interaction design, linguistics, management, psychology, rhetoric, sociology, and the like, we hope that the work of each may inform the others, suggesting new questions, methods, perspectives, and design approaches.

= About Paper Topics =

We are seeking papers that address one or both of the following two general areas:

• Understanding Practice. The burgeoning popularity of the internet (and intranets) provides an opportunity to study and characterize new forms of conversational practice. Questions of interest range from how various features of conversations (e.g., turn-taking, topic organization, expression of paralinguistic information) have adapted in response to the digital medium, to new roles played by persistent conversation in domains such as education, business, and entertainment.
• Design. Digital systems do not currently support conversation well: It is difficult to converse with grace, clarity, depth and coherence over networks. But this need not remain the case. Toward this end, we welcome analyses of existing systems as well as designs for new systems which better support conversation. Also of interest are inquiries into how participants design their own conversations within the digital medium -- that is, how they make use of system features to create, structure, and regulate their discourse. Examples of appropriate topics include, but are not limited to:
  • Turn-taking, threading, and other structural features of CMC
  • The dynamics of large scale conversation systems (e.g., USENET)
  • Methods for summarizing or visualizing conversation archives
  • Sudies of virtual communities or other sites of digital conversation
  • The roles of mediated conversation in knowledge management
  • Studies of the use of instant messaging in large organizations
  • Novel designs for computer-mediated conversation systems
  • Analyses of or designs for distance learning systems

For other examples see the list of previous years' papers:
http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC_History.html

= The Workshop =

The minitrack is normally preceded by a half-day workshop open to all minitrack authors, as well as those who will form the core audience for the minitrack. We will know whether the workshop has been accepted for HICSS 2007 in early April. Watch the online version of this call for more details: http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC.html

Instructions for Abstract Submission =

Submit a 250 word abstract of your proposed paper via email to the chairs: Tom Erickson <snowfall@acm.org>, Susan Herring <herring@indiana.edu> by the deadline noted above.

= Instructions for Paper Submission =

* HICSS papers must contain original material not previously published, or currently submitted elsewhere. All papers will be submitted in double column publication format and limited to 10 pages including diagrams and references. Papers undergo a double-blind review.
* Do not submit the manuscript to more than one Minitrack. If unsure which Minitrack is appropriate, submit the abstract to the Track Chair for guidance.
* Submit your full paper according to the instructions that will appear on the HICSS web site: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/

= For More Information =

* This call for participation, etc.:
http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC.html

* History (papers and participants in previous minitracks):
http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC_History.html

* About the minitrack, contact: snowfall@acm.org , herring@indiana.edu

* About the HICSS conference, see: http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/

Posted by prolurkr at 02:19 PM | TrackBack

Two IT Public Policy Postdocs - University of Michigan

The Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) Program in the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan seeks to fill up to two postdoctoral fellow positions (each for two years in residence.) Fellows will be expected to perform research in some aspect of science and technology policy, teach two courses per year in science and technology policy, help to organize a conference and seminar series, and work with faculty to develop the STPP program. In addition to working with colleagues in STPP and the Ford School, fellows will find a wide range of programs at University of Michigan that provide opportunities for enrichment and collaboration, including leading programs in law, business, public health, medicine, engineering, the sciences, and science & technology studies.

Applicants should be recent recipients of the doctoral degree, with demonstrated interest in science and technology policy. Areas of specialization and disciplinary approaches are open. These fellowships are made possible through a generous gift from The Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation. Salary is competitive and includes benefits. Modest funds will also be provided for moving, conferences, and research. The start date for this position is August 2006, although this date is flexible. Awardees will be expected to be in residence in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the time of their award and be an active colleague within UM.

Applications received by April 1, 2006, will be given first consideration, although we will continue to accept applications after that date. Please send application materials, including a CV, letter describing research and teaching interests, a statement outlining the proposed research project, and three letters of reference to:

STPP Fellow Search
Attn: Sharon Disney
Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
440 Lorch Hall, 611 Tappan Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220 USA

Posted by prolurkr at 07:33 AM | TrackBack

Doing Digital History: An Introduction for Historians of Science, Technology, and Industry

Doing Digital History: An Introduction for Historians of Science, Technology, and Industry
June 12-16, 2006

The Center for History and New Media's Echo project (http://echo.gmu.edu) invites scholars of the history of science, technology, and industry to our second workshop on the theory and practice of digital history. Participants will explore the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, writing and presentation of history; genres of online history; website infrastructure and design; document digitization; the process of identifying and building online history audiences; and issues of copyright and preservation. The workshop, which is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the National History Center, will be held at George Mason University's Arlington campus, conveniently located in metropolitan Washington, DC. Thanks to support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, there will be no registration fee, and a limited number of fellowships are available to defray the costs of travel and lodging for graduate students and young scholars. As spaces are limited, please submit an application form by March 10, 2006 (available at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/1358/).

Posted by prolurkr at 09:38 AM | TrackBack

Panels for the 2006 MLA Convention, Division on Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing

Here are the panels for the 2006 MLA Convention, Division on Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing. If your paper is accepted, you will have to become a member of the MLA by April 1--if you are a member already, then you're all set. Please send your proposal to the person chairing the session; you can submit to more than one session, although if you're selected for both, I assume you'd be asked to choose one.

1. Theorist Autobiographers. Autobiographical works by writers known as theorists, and/or life-writing that develops theoretical argument (e.g. Augustine, Confessions; Montaigne, essays; Wordsworth, Prelude; Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman; Derrida, Circumfession; Sedgwick, Dialogue on Love). 250-word abstracts by March 10 to Carolyn Williams (carolyn.williams@rutgers.edu).

2. Life Writing and Humor. Parody, irony, and satire as modes for understanding and interrogating life writing genres. Self-deprecation or mockery as strategies for identity construction. Lives of comic writers, artists, performers. 250-word abstracts by March 10 to Craig Howes (craighow@hawaii.edu)

3. Auto/Graphics after Maus. Interaction between word and image; construction of personae through documents, portraits, anecdotes; narration and layout of time, space, history; "graphic" content as well as form. 250-word abstracts by March 10 to Gillian Whitlock (g.whitlock@uq.edu.au)

FYI--the current members of the division executive committee are Sarah Bird Wright, Carolyn Williams, Craig Howes, Alison Booth, and Gillian Whitlock.

Craig Howes
Director, Center for Biographical Research
Editor, _Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly_
Professor of English
1733 Donaghho Road
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822
E-mail: craighow@hawaii.edu , or biograph@hawaii.edu
Home Page: www.hawaii.edu/biograph

Posted by prolurkr at 12:54 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Gender as a Taboo: Places, Dynamics and Functions

Interdisciplinary Workshop organized by the Graduate Research Group Gender as a Category of Knowledge at Humboldt University, Berlin, 27th + 28th of October 2006

Gender as a Taboo: Places, Dynamics and Functions
Deadline: 10.04.2006
Organization: Dr. Ute Frietsch, Dr. Sabine Grenz, Dr. Lidia Guzy, Jennifer John, M.A., Beatrice Michaelis, M.A.

Gender is both a taboo and a field of knowledge. Gender as a taboo and gender as a category of knowledge are mutually dependent “they constitute a pair” comparable to the implicit and the explicit, secret and scandal, silence and speech.

One priority of the workshop is to interrogate what kind of "will to knowledge" (Foucault) motivates the talk and exposure of sexual acts, genitals etc. Furthermore, we want to investigate the "will" to ignore gender in sciences and other fields of knowledge. This includes questions of canon-making in academic disciplines and other fields of knowledge as well as of larger social mechanisms, such as political correctness and breaking discursive taboos (pretending to explicate what has long been silenced, thereby negating that enunciations of racism, sexism and other discriminatory modes have always already been practiced).

Not only becomes the marginalized tabooed but also the privileged. It remains unmarked and simultaneously marks its “other”. The preservation of power as well as the maintenance of social coherence appear to be crucial a cause of tabooing. How can we evaluate and analyse the ability of taboos to contain potential threats? Both the tabooing and the perpetuation of a binary logic of gender relations are instrumental in the construction and taxonomy of social and scientific communities, culture and human beings. Taboos, however, are situated and culturally as well as historically contingent.

The workshop is designed to examine places, dynamics, and specific functions of taboos concerning gender (gender performance, gender relations, homo/hetero/sexuality). How, for instance, can we intervene in a binary gender logic, if we recognise that gender studies is not innocent either in the process of tabooing other genders (Intersex, Trans*) in very material-corporeal and violent ways. How is (scientific/academic) knowledge structured by taboos? How does tabooing affect subjectivities? In how far can taboos be conceptualised as discursive? How does a taboo define who is in and who is out? In how far is tabooing ludicrous? Can a taboo concerning gender still function, if once articulated? Can canons incorporate taboos without de-tabooing them? How can we describe the limitations of taboos?

Taboo research exists in various fields, among others psychology/psychoanalysis, ethnology, sociology, theology, cultural studies, film and literary theory. At this workshop we wish to connect these two fields of knowledge (taboo and gender) in a transdisciplinary manner reflecting mechanisms of tabooing both within science and society. We invite contributions investigating gender as a taboo from all areas of academia, reaching from the natural sciences to arts/art theory. Papers should be self-reflexive concerning the status of gender in their own (inter/trans) disciplinary situatedness.

Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Joan Cadden (provisional)
Dr. Bettina Mathes

Conference languages will be German and English. However, discussions can also be held in French.

Conference fee: There is a small conference fee of 10 € for both days of the workshop to be paid at registration.

Travel expenses might be covered for invited papers.

Proposals should not exceed 2,000 characters. Please send them together with a CV until the 10th of April, 2006 to the following address: gradkollgeschlecht@hu-berlin.de
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/gkgeschlecht/veranstaltungen/tagung.htm

Posted by prolurkr at 05:40 PM | TrackBack

CFP - CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES, Doctroal Student Confernece Cardiff University

CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES

22-23 June 2006

Organised by doctoral students for doctoral students

Graduate School in Humanities, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

The convenors of the panels listed below are now inviting abstracts for papers which examine the concept of identity, and encourage submissions from those examining aspects of personal, linguistic, national and cultural identity. Proposals examining the following areas are especially welcome:

• Post colonialism
• Place and Identity
• New Identities
• Organizational Identities
• Black Identity
• Religious Identity
• Identity and Material Culture
• Nationalism and Its Effect (to include Representation of Identity in Popular Culture, and Wales and Welsh identity)

Abstracts (300 words) should be sent by e-mail to Gwenllian Lansdown, ConstructingIdentities@cf.ac.uk by 30th April 2006. Papers are expected to last for 20 minutes. Proposals for additional panels may also be considered.

Information about registration may be obtained from the conference website at www.cf.ac.uk/constructingidentities or from the email address above. The conference is subsidised and therefore a nominal charge of £20 will be levied to cover meals and accommodation.

Constructing Identities is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Posted by prolurkr at 12:20 PM | TrackBack

Internet as “hazard” - hazard research

This is worth looking into if your dissertation is "hazard" related.

The Natural Hazards Center and the Public Entity Risk Institute

(PERI), in partnership with the National Science Foundation and Swiss Reinsurance Company (Swiss Re), will be awarding PhD dissertation fellowships to support research on any aspect of natural and human-made hazards, risks, and disasters. The goal of the program is to foster the development of the next generation of interdisciplinary hazards scholars who can offer wide-ranging contributions to the body of knowledge in hazards research. As a relatively small subset of many different disciplines, the interdisciplinary hazards field relies to
an unusual extent on an influx of young scholars committed simultaneously to their own disciplines and to the more practical, applied aspects of the field. This combination can be difficult to achieve in today's traditional academic climate, and thus this program helps solidify student interest in and commitment to hazards via financial support.

Applications for the second round of PERISHIP Awards are due September 1, 2006. Complete program information, including deadlines, eligibility, and application requirements, is available at http://www.cudenver.edu/periship/. Specific questions can be directed to Audre Hoffman, PERI, 11350 Random Hills Road, #210, Fairfax, VA 22030; (703) 352-1846; e-mail: periship@riskinstitute.org .

Posted by prolurkr at 11:37 AM | TrackBack

AoIR deadline extended

The deadline for paper abstracts submissions for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Conference has been extended to 21 February.

Related post:

CFP - IR 7.0: INTERNET CONVERGENCES

Posted by prolurkr at 10:59 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award

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.

Competition is open to graduate or undergraduate students of all disciplines. Works that are published or accepted for publication are not eligible for award consideration. The top three papers will receive Couch Awards to be presented at the 2006 meeting of the National Communication Association (NCA) in San Antonio, Texas. The top paper will be awarded a certificate and a cash prize of $300 US, runner up will receive a certificate and a cash prize of $200 US, and a third paper will receive a certificate and a cash prize of $100 US. All three
authors will be invited to present their work at a session of the NCA conference, November 16-19, 2006.

Those interested should send a copy of their paper, with a 100-word abstract, electronically to Mark Johns at johnsmar@luther.edu Submission deadline is May 1, 2006. Notification of award will be sent by June 15.

Those with questions or comments about Couch Award application, please contact:
Mark D. Johns
Dept. of Communication Studies
Luther College
Decorah, IA 52101
Tel: (563) 387-1347
E-mail: johnsmar@luther.edu

Posted by prolurkr at 12:09 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure

Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure
(abstracts by 3/31/06; accepted manuscripts by 5/19/06)

Personal testimony seems ubiquitous in contemporary culture, raising fundamental questions: is the authentic personal disclosure we apparently prize--whether in classrooms, on television, in clinical or legal settings, or elsewhere--productive, advisable, or even possible, from a psychoanalytic or other theoretical perspective? Manifestations of a confessional impulse are widely available not only in in fiction, poetry, autobiography, and memoirs but also in ethnography, within therapeutic or legal frameworks, in popular, so-called "reality"
television, in "expressivist" writing theories and, increasingly, in a testimonial strain observable in pedagogical scholarship. Less available to general readers and viewers, however, are the strategies for assessing modes of personal disclosure in literature, the classroom and popular media.

Which theories, concepts, and terms equip interested observers with a critical understanding of confessional strategies and effects? Compelling Confessions aims to make available to general readers a range of essays (2500-5000 words) that visibly interact with relevant theory by way of making clear the promise, pressures, procedures and/or pitfalls connected with "telling one's story." In other words, this compilation aims to provide a critical vocabulary with which its readers might more systematically assess the confessional rhetoric they
encounter. Essays that interrogate unexamined assumptions within the discourse about personal disclosure are welcome; the crucial point is that they make what is at stake in their interrogations clear and meaningful to a general readership. Compelling Confessions differs from collections such as Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (Routledge) in its inclusion of popular media, non-literary communication, and contemporary pedagogy within the confessional paradigm and in its purposive aim at a non-scholarly audience.

Please direct all inquiries/abstracts to sdiamond@ysu.edu and use "Compelling Confessions" as the subject line to ensure a prompt response. Abstracts should be pasted into e-messages (not posted as attachments) accepted manuscripts should be snail-mailed (along with authors' contact information) to S. Diamond, Department of English, Youngstown State University, One University Plaza, Youngstown, OH 44555. Deadline for abstracts: March 31, 2006. Deadline for accepted manuscripts: May 19, 2006.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:42 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Refashioning the Self: Authorial Construction in Autobiographical Writing

Refashioning the Self: Authorial Construction in Autobiographical Writing
Abstracts are invited for a proposed special session at the annual Modern Language Association Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27-30 December 2006.

This session, pending approval of the MLA program committee, will examine how authors write about themselves in various contexts. Papers may explore authorial self-reflexivity in novels, poetry, diaries, letters, or other contexts such as e-mail or speeches. The session will address such questions as the following:

• How do authors construct themselves through their work?
• To what extent does an author's construct of self differ from, say, a biographer's construct?
• In what ways does the author-created self inform our understanding of his or her biography?
• What legitimacy do we give to authorial self construction?
• How do autobiographical tendencies in a work change our interpretation of the piece and other works?
• How might the author's self-construction reshape our understandings of genre?

Please send an abstract (300-word limit, please), a brief vitae, and relevant contact information to ben_p_robertson@hotmail.com by 15 March 2006. Submissions by e-mail are preferred, but you may post your materials to:

Ben P. Robertson
English Department
Troy University
Troy, AL 36082

Posted by prolurkr at 06:42 PM | TrackBack

CFP - NEW DIRECTIONS IN CHILDREN'S GEOGRAPHIES

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CHILDREN'S GEOGRAPHIES

7th and 8th September 2006
Centre for Children and Youth
The University of Northampton

Convenors:
Faith Tucker, John Horton, Peter Kraftl, Sarah Armstrong

Themes:
The growth of geographical research on the experiences and lifestyles of children and young people has been well documented. The vibrancy of this research field is illustrated, for example, by the publication in 2000 of Holloway and Valentine's Children's Geographies: playing, living learning, the launch of Children's Geographies journal in 2003, a special edition of the Geographical Associations' Geography journal (2003), and regular sessions at international conferences. We propose that it is timely for researchers to step back, reflect upon progress made to date, and debate new directions in children's geographies.

We invite papers on the following themes:

• the body, emotions and children's geographies
• the ethics of children's geographies
• participatory research with children
• critical approaches to designing environments for children
• mobilities and children's geographies
• quantitative approaches to childhood research
• popular culture and children's geographies
• teaching, learning and children's geographies

Abstracts (c.200 words) should be emailed to:
faith.tucker@northampton.ac.uk by 31st March 2006. If you would like to present a paper on a 'new direction in children's geographies' not listed above, please let us know.

For further information, please contact Dr Faith Tucker.

Associated reading: First Steps: A primer on the geographies of children and youth (pdf)

Posted by prolurkr at 06:40 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Second International Workshop on Digital Genre

Call for contributions
Second International Workshop on Digital Genre
Halmstad, Sweden
June 15-16,2006
http://digitalgenre.hh.se/

As a author within the digital genre track at HICSS we would like to personally invite you to the Second International Workshop on Digital Genre that will be held in Halmstad, located at the west coast of Sweden, June 15-16 2006.

The second international workshop will explore the world of Digital Genre, from both theoretical and practical aspects. In the 1st Workshop, held in Halifax, Canada, we explored E-News from the perspectives of design issue and challenges for managing the electronic delivery of news. In particular, we explored the impact of current work on genre and news delivery, user profiles, task, and future technologies. This year we would like to extend our discussions to other application areas including web searching, tourism, management information, new media, blogs, and digital libraries.

The goals of the workshop include building a stronger genre community and we hope that one outcome of the workshop would be a joint position paper that can be submitted to the Genre Track at the HICSS conference. We will also initiate the Genre Team Crazy Swedish Golf Challenge at the workshop.

Interested people can submit to the following categories:

Position papers - 2 to 5 pages for web and printed proceedings
Posters - send in a one page description for proceedings

Important dates:
March 1, 2006 - all submissions to carina.ihlstrom@ide.hh.se
April 1, 2006 - notification

Key Note Speakers:
Lars Svensson, University of Trollhättan/Uddevalla, Sweden
"Bridging Design theory and Practice with (Techno-Pedagogical) Genres"
Mike Shepherd, Dalhousie University, Canada
"Automatic Detection of CyberGenre"
For more information please visit http://digitalgenre.hh.se/

Best regards,
Carina Ihlström and Carolyn Watters
Carina Ihlström, Ph.D.
Director of Studies and Lableader MI-lab (with Maria Åkesson)
Halmstad University
P.O. Box 823
301 18 Halmstad
Sweden
Phone: +46 35 16 75 31
Mobile: +46 703 18 73 55

Posted by prolurkr at 10:17 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Interacting with Computers Journal

INTERACTING WITH COMPUTERS JOURNAL

Special Issue of Interacting with Computers on "HCI Issues in Computer Games" http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~zaphiri/Announcements/games.html

Guest Editors
Dr. Panayiotis Zaphiris (zaphiri@soi.city.ac.uk) and CS Ang Centre for HCI Design, City University London

Introduction to special issue topic

Computer Games are at the forefront of technological innovation and their popularity in research is also increasing. Their wide presence and use makes Computer Games a major factor affecting the way people socialize, learn and possibly work. Computer Games are also beginning to attract the attention of educators and education technologists. With this special issue of Interacting with Computers we wish to explore the relationship between Computer Games and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Are current HCI techniques and ethodologies appropriate for designing Computer Games? Do we need new Computer Game focused HCI methods, theories and paradigms? What are the new challenges when it comes to evaluating Computer Games?

This special issue of Interacting with Computers is inviting contributions from both the academic community and industry. It will focus on issues surrounding the analysis, design, development and evaluation of Computer Games and the issues surrounding them.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Design approaches and techniques suitable for Computer Games
• Usability studies regarding Computer Games
• Theoretical and/or pedagogical foundations for analysing Computer Games
• Within-game and/or out-game activities and their HCI analysis
• Computer Games and Online Communities
• Social and Cultural Issues and Computer Games
• Accessibility of Computer Games
• Transfer of gaming metaphors to business applications

"Interacting with Computers" is an interdisciplinary journal of Human-Computer Interaction, published by Elsevier. More information about this journal can be found at:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/525445/description

IwC special issues contain only 5 - 6 papers, each of no more than 10,000 words (so acceptance will be fairly selective).

Submission:

Papers should be submitted through the manuscript management system at http://ees.elsevier.com/iwc/ by the 10th of April 2006. The style standard is that of the American Psychological Association (APA), more details about which can be obtained from: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/DocAPAFormatting.html

Important dates:

Full paper submission: 10th April 2006 (Monday)
Response to authors: 8th May 2006 (Monday)
Final version of papers: 5th June 2006 (Monday)
Planned publication: September 2006

Posted by prolurkr at 05:23 PM | TrackBack

CFP - PRESENCE 2006

PRESENCE 2006
9th Annual International Workshop on Presence
Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Cleveland State University
August 24-26, 2006
Submission deadline: April 3, 2006
Full details on the web at http://ispr.info

OVERVIEW

Academics and practitioners with an interest in the concept of (tele)presence are invited to submit their work for presentation at PRESENCE 2006 at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio, August 24-26, 2006.

The ninth in a series of highly successful international workshops, PRESENCE 2006 will provide an open discussion forum to share ideas regarding concepts and theories, measurement techniques, technology, and applications related to presence, the psychological state or subjective perception in which a person fails to accurately and completely acknowledge the role of technology in an experience, including the sense of 'being there' experienced by users of advanced media such as virtual reality. The concept of presence has been the focus of increasing scholarly attention since at least Minsky's "Telepresence" in 1980. Recently there has been a burst of funded research activity in this area with the European FET Presence Research initiative. What do we really know about presence and its determinants? How can presence be successfully delivered with today's technology? This conference invites papers that are based on empirical results from studies of presence and related issues and/or that make substantial advances in theoretical understanding of presence and/or that contribute to the technology for the delivery of presence. High quality papers which make substantial contributions to the field are sought; submissions will be rigorously evaluated by peer reviewers.

Work accepted for presentation will be included in the official conference proceedings and posted on the ISPR web site. Some of the presented papers will be selected for publication in one or more special issues of CyberPsychology & Behavior or Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.

PRESENCE 2006 takes place in Cleveland and is hosted by Cleveland State University. The conference is organized by ISPR, the International Society for Presence Research.

TOPICS

Submissions of papers, demonstrations, and panels that represent completed or ongoing work are encouraged in areas including but not limited to:

• Explications of the presence concept
• Presence evaluation/measurement methodologies
• Causes and consequences (effects) of presence
• Presence in shared virtual environments and online communities
• Social/affective interfaces, virtual agents, parasocial interactions
• Presence-associated technologies:
  • Immersive, interactive, multimodal displays
  • Advanced broadcast and cinematic displays (stereoscopic TV, HDTV, IMAX)
  • Virtual environments/simulators
  • 3-D sound
  • Haptic/tactile displays
• Presence applications:
  • Education and training
  • Medicine and therapy
  • Entertainment
  • Communication and collaboration
  • Teleoperation
  • Presence and design
  • Presence in art
• Presence and philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of 'reality')
• The ethics of presence
• Presence in the future: Media experiences in the 21st century and beyond

CONFERENCE FORMAT

Like the earlier workshops, PRESENCE 2006 will have an interactive format in which all participants (attendees, presenters, invited speakers) attend each of the sessions as well as several social events, allowing participants to exchange ideas and build knowledge together as the conference progresses.

The conference will feature keynote presentations by prominent presence scholars (details to be announced soon).

VENUE

The Workshop will be hosted by Cleveland State University, located in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. Located on the southern shore of Lake Erie, Cleveland boasts world-class cultural institutions, major-league sports, state-of-the-art attractions, unique ethnic neighborhoods, great shopping and dining, vibrant nightlife, a national park for outdoor recreation, and much more. It was ranked #1 for "Most Livable City" in the U.S. and 26th in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit (October 2005), a Top 10 Summer Vacation Destination by msn.com (May 2004, June 2003), one of the 10 ten safest and culturally most fascinating cities to visit in the U.S. by Travel Smart (January 2004), a Top 10 city for walking by The American Podiatric Medical Association (November 2003), a Top 25 Arts Destination, by Americanstyle.com (October 2003), #3 City That Works Hardest to Accommodate Group Tours by Destinations magazine (April 2001), and Top Five U.S. City for Meetings by Get There Direct Meeting Company (February 2001). Cleveland's also the home of the 4th Best Beer in the Country (Great Lakes Brewing Company, Dortmunder Gold) according to American Heritage (July 2002)

For more information about Cleveland visit the web site of the Cleveland Convention & Visitors Bureau (http://www.travelcleveland.com/); for more information
about Cleveland State University, visit the CSU web site (http://www.csuohio.edu/).

SUBMISSIONS

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit work in the following categories:

Papers: Comprehensive descriptions of original research or design work within the scope of the workshop. Papers are 5 to 12 pages in the PRESENCE 2006 template format (see submission page of the conference web site) and will be considered for oral presentation.

Panels: Sets of presentations on a single theme or topic within the scope of the workshop. Submitters are encouraged to be creative regarding both the topic or theme and the format for panel proposals, which are limited to 4 pages in the PRESENCE 2006 template format.

Extended abstracts: Brief presentations of tentative or preliminary results of research or design work within the scope of the workshop. Extended abstracts are 2 to 4 pages in the PRESENCE 2006 template format and will be considered for oral presentation after all accepted full papers are scheduled.

Posters: Visual display presentations. Submissions are limited to 4 pages which contain miniature versions of the larger pages that would be displayed at the conference.

Demonstrations/exhibitions: Step-by-step audiovisual demonstrations and/or hands-on experiences of (commercial or academic) work within the scope of the workshop. Proposals for demonstrations/exhibitions are limited to 4 pages in the PRESENCE 2006 template format.

Please submit your work online at the submission page of the conference web site at <http://ispr.info> by the conference deadline of April 3, 2006.

REGISTRATION

Registration costs before or on July 1 are 250 USD for individuals with an academic, governmental, or non-profit affiliation; 350 USD for individuals with a corporate affiliation; and 125 USD for graduate students. (For costs in other currencies, go to http://www.x-rates.com). All registration fees will include admission to all Workshop sessions, conference materials, refreshments during breaks, lunches and conference dinner/reception.

Registration opens February 13, 2006. Please visit the registration page of the conference web site at <http://ispr.info > for the registration and payment forms and procedures.

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

Conference co-chairs
Cheryl Campanella Bracken (Cleveland State University, USA)
Matthew Lombard (Temple University, USA)
Program Committee (subject to change)
Mariano Alcaniz (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain)
Carlo Alberto Avizzano (Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Italy)
Jeremy N. Bailenson (Stanford University, USA)
Rosa Baños (University of Valencia, Spain)
Woody Barfield (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
Frank Biocca (MIND Labs, Michigan State University, USA)
Edwin Blake (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Cristina Botella Arbona (Universitat Jaume I, Spain)
Doug Bowman (Virginia Tech, USA)
Cheryl Campanella Bracken (Cleveland State University, USA)
Martin Buss (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany)
Alan Chalmers (University of Bristol, UK)
Jonathan Freeman (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)
Doron Friedman (University College London, UK)
Luciano Gamberini (University of Padua, Italy)
Maia Garau (University College London, UK)
Marco Gillies (University College London, UK)
Ilona Heldal (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
Wijnand Ijsselsteijn (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands)
Roy Kalawsky (Loughborough University, UK)
Rita Lauria (North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, USA)
Jane Lessiter (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)
Matthew Lombard (Temple University, USA)
Celine Loscos (University College London, UK)
Katerina Mania (University of Sussex, UK)
Giorgio Metta (Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy)
Christa Neuper (University of Graz, Austria)
Miriam Reiner (Technion: Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
Albert Skip Rizzo (University of Southern California, USA)
Daniela Romano (University of Sheffield, UK)
Roy Ruddle (University of Leeds, UK)
Maria Victoria Sanchez-Vives (Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante, Spain)
Ralph Schroeder (Oxford Internet Institute, UK)
Thomas Schubert (University of Jena, Germany)
Melissa E. Selverian (Temple University, USA)
Mel Slater (University College London, UK)
Anna Spagnolli (University of Padua, Italy)
Anthony Steed (University College London, UK)
Aleksander Väljamäe (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
Walter Van de Velde (European Commission, EU)
Paul F.M.J. Verschure (Institute of Neuroinformatics, Switzerland)
Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy (University College London, UK)
Suzanne J. Weghorst (University of Washington, USA)
Mary Whitton (University of North Carolina, USA)

CONTACT

For more information or assistance, please send e-mail to help@ispr and/or contact the conference co-chairs.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:46 PM | TrackBack

CFP - English Studies Forum (Writing/Life)

The electronic peer-reviewed English Studies Forum (www.bsu.edu/web/esf) seeks innovative creative and critical writing. The editors of ESF want to feature engaging critical essays, as well as truly creative and experimental work-fiction, poetry, and nonfiction-that takes formal risks.

The editors are currently soliciting manuscripts for several ongoing sites, including forums on the postmodern imagination and beyond, the individual in war, parody / play / performance, mind and matter, and spaces. In spring-summer 2006, a new forum on Writing/Life will debut. The editors invite submissions investigating the complex intersections of writing and living. Critical and creative work may address the writing life, life-writing, bio-texts, biography and autobiography, writing environments, and reading life, among other topics.

Electronic submissions (MS Word) are preferred. Critical papers should conform to M.L.A. style and include a bibliography, if appropriate.

Send inquiries or submissions to:

Trey Strecker, Editor in Chief
English Studies Forum
Department of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306-0460
tstrecker@bsu.edu

Posted by prolurkr at 09:26 AM | TrackBack

CFP - 4S

News from 4S or The Society for Social Studies of Science
2006 Annual Meeting:
November 2-4, 2006, Vancouver, B.C, Canada

The 2006 4S conference will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the society. The meeting will be co-located with the History of Science Society and Philosophy of Science Association, which will be in a hotel a few blocks away. "Information Central" for the meeting this year is at http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.htm.

Call for Papers: Silence, Suffering and Survival

This year's theme is "Silence, Suffering and Survival", and it is designed to explore the overlooked spaces, boundaries, actors, networks, and artifacts of science and technology. We welcome papers and panels that address questions about the silences of silencing, unintended consequences, and persistence in science, technology and STS. The topic is meant to open up and stir discussion about theorizing in areas we may have overlooked such as the process of secrecy under which processes of silence are often conducted.

Possible topics might include the science and technology of slavery, disability, survival, warfare, peace, and quantification. Discussions might address de-moralization and re-moralization within science, technology and STS, the sort of silence/noise created by technology/ science, and how technology/science create and alleviate suffering and/or survival. This could include processes of survival that are often off the record, such as workarounds, "older ways of knowing", older (non-scientific) ways of knowing, and …?

Submission deadline is April 3. Submit now Online submission is now open for both abstracts and sessions.

New session formats

We will be exploring some new session formats this year, including new media presentations, "fire-side chats", and junior-senior sessions. Some sessions at the Vancouver 4S will be designated "working sessions." For these sessions, papers will be made available online in advance of the conference so that panel members and attendees will be able to read them before arriving; the conference session then will be an opportunity for more substantial discussion. If you would like to organize or contribute to a working session, please contact Josh Greenberg, Tarleton Gillespie, or Sergio Sismondo. If you have ideas for these or other session formats, please contact the Program Chair: Wenda Bauchspies.

Organize panels online

4S members are invited to use the Discussion Board in the Members Section of the web site to announce ideas for panels and invite participation. Log in. Authors' help needed for 4S book exhibit As we are planning the 4S meeting exhibits for Vancouver in 2006, it is also helpful for authors to send us notification of their recent publications, and to remind their editors or marketing contacts at their publishers that they will be attending a conference and would appreciate display copies or other promotional materials, or publisher exhibits, at these meetings. More information will be available as we coordinate the exhibit plans with HSS/PSA for the annual meetings. Please contact Jennifer L. Croissant or the Program
Chair Wenda Bauchspies for more information.

W.K. Bauchspies, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, & Society and Women's Studies
Pennsylvania State University
101 Old Botany Bldg
University Park, PA 16802
814 865 3046 and fax 814 865 3047

Posted by prolurkr at 06:49 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Life Writing, Marginalization, Resistance

CFP: Life Writing, Marginalization, Resistance
(3/15/06; MLA '06, 12/27/06-12/30/06)

Call For Papers for a proposed Special Session
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Annual meeting December 27-30, 2006, in Philadelphia

I am requesting submissions for a proposed panel/special session entitled Life Writing, Marginalization, Resistance for MLA 2006 in Philadelphia, PA. Participants must be members by
April 7th and the complete panel with proposals must be determined and submitted to the MLA program committee for evaluation by April 1. I am interested in papers analyzing strategies of resistance in visual and/or written texts particularly when pertaining to border identities. Please email 1-2 page abstracts and brief cvs by March 15th to Barbara L. Ciccarelli ciccareb@neumann.edu.

Barbara L. Ciccarelli, PhD
Assistant Professor of English
Neumann College
Aston, PA 19014

Posted by prolurkr at 05:27 PM | TrackBack

CFP - First Monday Conference

First Monday Conference
FM10 Openness: Code, science and content
15-17 May 2006, at The University of Illinois at Chicago

Celebrate ten years of First Monday!

Register at http://numenor.lib.uic.edu/fmconference/

Send an abstract or paper to http://numenor.lib.uic.edu/fmconference/

Thanks to a grant from The Open Society Institute, as many as 20 participants from developing countries may receive grants to attend the Conference. An application form can be found at http://firstmonday.org/fm10/FM10_OSI_fundreq.doc. Deadline 10 February 2006.

The Conference is generously sponsored by The Open Society Institute, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The University of Illinois at Chicago University Library and The Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), University of Maastricht.

About the Conference

Recent years have seen a strong interest among academics, policy makers, activists, business and other practitioners on open collaboration and access as a driver of creativity. In some areas, such as free software / open source, sustainable business models have emerged that are holding their own against more traditional, proprietary software industries. In the sciences, the notions of open science and open data demonstrate the strong tradition of openness in the academic community that, despite its past successes, is increasingly under threat. And open access journals and other open content provide inspiring examples of collaborative creativity and participatory access, such as Wikipedia, while still in search of models to ensure sustainability.

There are clear links between these areas of openness: open content often looks explicitly towards open source software for business models, and open science provides through its history a glimpse of the potential of openness, how it can work, as well as a warning of the threats it may face. Finally, open collaboration is closely linked to access to knowledge issues, enabling active participation rather than passive consumption especially in developing countries.

Despite these clear links, there has been surprisingly little thoughtful analysis of this convergence, or of the real value of the common aspect of open collaboration. In particular, while open source software - due to its strong impact on business and on bridging the digital divide - has drawn much attention, it may provide false hopes for the sustainability of openness in other areas of content that need careful examination. The conference -- FM10 Openness: Code, science and content - Making collaborative creativity sustainable -- provides a platform for such analysis and discussion, resulting in concrete proposals for sustainable models for open collaboration in creative domains.

The Conference will draw on the experience of First Monday as the foremost online, peer-reviewed academic journal covering these issues since May 1996. Not only has First Monday published numerous papers by leading scholars on the topics of open collaboration, open access, and open content in its various forms, it is itself an example of open collaboration in practice: for a decade, the journal has been published on a purely voluntary basis, with no subscription fees, advertising, sponsorship or other revenues. The success of First Monday is demonstrated by thousands of readers around the world, downloading hundreds of thousands of papers each month.

For more details, contact Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor of First Monday at ejv@uic.edu. We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

Posted by prolurkr at 01:07 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies

Storytelling, Self, Society is a bi-annual, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarship on a wide variety of topics related to storytelling as interpersonal, performance, or public discourse. Papers may represent disciplines including but not limited to storytelling, folklore, cultural studies, communication, English, education, library science, health care, business, peace studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, pop culture, theater and performance studies. In addition, a variety of items will be considered for review, including print publications, recordings and performances. Please indicate in your response if you are interested in reviewing a recently experienced storytelling performance. Contact Janice M. Del Negro, review editor, at jdelnegro@dom.edu to indicate interest and for additional information. For more information on the journal, we invite submitters to visit our web site: www.fau.edu/storytelling/journal.

For consideration in the Fall 2006, issue, please e-mail a completed manuscript by March 1, 2006, to:

Caren S. Neile, MFA, Ph.D.
Managing Editor, Storytelling, Self, Society
cneile@fau.edu

Manuscripts (headings and in-text citations), abstracts, references/works cited, figures, and tables must conform either to: (a) the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2001, Fifth Edition) guidelines, or (b) to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (2003, Sixth Edition, Modern Language Association of America). Contributors are encouraged to follow the guidelines of these manuals for avoiding bias in language. Each submission should include a single-paragraph abstract of no more than 120 words on a separate page, preceding the manuscript. Submittors should indicate whether their submissions conform for MLA or APA style, and include in the letter to the Managing Editor the history of the manuscript (conference paper, Master's Thesis, Dissertation, part of a larger study, to name a few). By submitting to SSS, authors warrant that (a) they will not submit their manuscript to any other publication while the manuscript is under review with SSS, (b) the work is original and not previously published in any form, and (c) appropriate credit has been given to other contributors, including students, to the project. Manuscripts should be no more than 20 double-spaced pages (excluding references, tables, figures, or appendixes; 12-pt. Times New Roman, 1-inch page margins all around). Manuscripts that do not conform to the mission of the journal, or do not comply with the submission guidelines, will not be reviewed. In submitting, authors agree to assign copyright of their manuscripts, if accepted, to SSS.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:15 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Society for the History of Technology

The Society for the History of Technology will hold its annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 12-16, 2006. The Program Committee is seeking proposals for both individual papers and complete panels. Proposals from those new to SHOT are welcome, regardless of discipline.

As usual, the Program Committee invites paper and panel proposals on any topic in the history of technology, broadly defined. Of special interest for 2006 are proposals that engage with the following themes:

1. Technology, Games, and Entertainment
2. Technology, Race, and Ethnicity
3. Conversations between History of Technology and other Disciplines

For the 2006 meeting the Program Committee is also encouraging unconventional sessions, that is, session formats that vary in useful ways from the typical three/four papers with comment. These might include (but are not limited to) sessions with no formal commentator, workshop-style sessions with papers that are pre-circulated electronically, or "author meets critics" sessions.

The Program Committee's highest priority in evaluating paper and panel proposals is scholarly excellence. In evaluating panel proposals the Program Committee is especially interested in sessions that team established and younger scholars, and/or draw participants from multiple institutions and multiple countries. The deadline for proposals is March 15, 2006. Please submit your proposals to light@northwestern.edu. See below for proposal guidelines and submission instructions.

Guidelines for Proposals:
Proposals for individual papers must include:

• A one-page abstract (maximum 600 words) indicating the paper topic, argument(s) made, and evidence base used
• A one-page c.v.
• A completed AV equipment request form (available on the SHOT website)

Proposals for complete sessions must include:

• A description of the session that explains how individual papers contribute to an overarching theme
• A list of the presenters' names and paper titles
• For each presenter, a one-page abstract (maximum 600 words) indicating the paper topic, argument(s) made, and evidence base used, as well as a one-page c.v.
• For the commentator (if any), chair, and session organizer (if s/he is not one of the session's panelists), a one-page c.v.
• For each presenter, a completed AV equipment request form (available on the SHOT website)
• Panel proposals sponsored by any SHOT Special Interest Group should be clearly indicated

Submission Instructions:

• Materials should be sent in a single email message to light@northwestern.edu with electronic copies of all elements of the complete proposal as attachments, formatted in Microsoft Word (any version of Word is fine, but it must be in Word).
• Whether submitting an individual paper or a complete panel, the program chair needs to receive a separate attachment for each item (c.v., proposal, and AV request form).
• Please save your proposal with your last name and the word "proposal" (for example, "brown.proposal.doc")
• Please save your c.v. also with your last name and the word "vitae" (for example, "brown.vitae.doc")
• In case of a panel, please save each individual abstract and c.v. with the presenter's last name and the word "abstract" or "vitae" (for example, "brown.abstract.doc" and "brown.vitae.doc")

General information:

• While SHOT rules exclude multiple submissions (i.e. submitting more than one individual paper proposal, or proposing both an individual paper and a paper as part of a session), scholars may both propose a paper and serve as a commentator or session chair.
• Since SHOT 2007 will be the organization's 50th anniversary celebration, scholars interested in presenting work on the history of SHOT are asked to defer those submissions until next year. Presenting at the 2006 meeting will not rule out presenting in 2007, as SHOT is waiving its customary rule preventing scholars from presenting at two consecutive domestic meetings.
• Please note that due to cost factors, SHOT cannot guarantee the availability of digital projectors for all sessions. Those with access to projectors are encouraged to bring their own, and to let the Program Committee know if they might have equipment to share. For more information about AV equipment, please see the online AV request form.
• Additional information about the 2006 meeting can be found online at http://www.shot.jhu.edu/Annual_Meeting/Annual_Meeting_Main_Page.htm
• For questions about the program themes, submission guidelines, or any other aspects of the Call for Papers, please email Jen Light, Program Committee Chair: light@northwestern.edu

Posted by prolurkr at 04:06 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Journal of Information, Communication, Society

Journal of Information, Communication, Society
10th Anniversary International Symposium
University of York,UK. 20th – 22nd September 2006

Supported by:
Social Informatics Research Unit (SIRU),
Department of Sociology, University of York

In association with
Oxford Internet Institute (OII)
Taylor & Francis Publishers

Conference Chairs:
Brian Loader, Co-Director of SIRU
Professor William Dutton, Director of the OII

Powerful new convergences of digital technologies together with rising adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) into everyday commercial, political and social life has led to pronouncements of a second generation of information society development. But what evidence exists to support this idea of a significant step change in the development and social, economic and political diffusion of ICTs?

This symposium seeks to take forward this debate by critically analysing key issues emerging from new inter-relationships between information, communication and society. It aims to: • explore the robustness of claims about the transformative effects and potential of information and communication technologies; • identify and discuss the methodologies that could be used to test such claims; • assess the current state of empirical research and highlight important gaps for future research; and • provide an international forum for the exchange of ideas, data and analysis.

Symposium Themes
The symposium is multidisciplinary and original papers are sought from researchers in all relevant subject areas. Papers submitted should address at least one of the seven broad areas around which the proceedings will be organised: e-health; spatial informatics; e-commerce & economics; young and older generations; privacy, trust and surveillance; e-governance; and, policy issues cutting across all these themes.

Submission of papers
Proposals for papers should be submitted as abstracts of no more than 500 words, and should include details of the proposer’s name, position, affiliation and contact details. Proposals should be submitted electronically to bl506@york.ac.uk . Submissions are welcome from established scholars and post-graduates alike.

Deadline for proposals: 1st April 2006
Authors of accepted papers notified by: 2nd May 2006

Posted by prolurkr at 01:53 PM | TrackBack

Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme

The OII is pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for the 4th OII Summer Doctoral Programme, which will be held in Oxford from the 15th to the 29th July 2006. Applications are welcomed from students in any discipline who are currently undertaking doctoral research on social, political, legal and economic issues relating to the Internet. Further information about the Programme and details of how to apply can be found at http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/teaching/?rq=sdp&year=2006 . The deadline for applications is 20th February 2006. Please feel free to forward this email to anyone who you think might be interested.

Kind regards,
Dr Victoria Nash
Policy and Research Officer
01865 287231
Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
1, St Giles
OX1 3JS
www.oii.ox.ac.uk

Posted by prolurkr at 01:26 PM | TrackBack

CFP - 12th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction and Culture

12th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction and Culture
Thursday, May 25 - Saturday, May 27, 2006
University of California, Los Angeles

Presented by

The Center for Language, Interaction and Culture Graduate Student Association at the University of California, Los Angeles
and
The Language, Interaction and Social Organization Graduate Student Association at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Plenary Speakers

Mary Bucholtz
University of California, Santa Barbara

John Lucy
University of Chicago

Geoff Raymond
University of California, Santa Barbara

Bambi Schieffelin
New York University


Submissions should address topics at the intersection of language, interaction, and culture and would preferably be based on recorded, naturally-occurring interaction. We welcome abstracts from graduate students and faculty. Speakers will have 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion. A subset of papers presented at the conference will be published in the conference proceedings, Crossroads in Language, Interaction, and Culture.

Abstracts are due no later than Friday, March 3, 2006 by electronic submission only. Please see submission guidelines below and the CLIC GSA webpage at www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/al/clic for more information.

Center for Language, Interaction and Culture, Graduate Student Association
University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Applied Linguistics
P.O. BOX 951531 3300 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1531
clicgsa@humnet.ucla.edu
www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/al/clic

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

This year we are only accepting submissions electronically through our website. Please go to http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/al/clic/abstractsubmit.htm to submit your abstract.

When accessing the submissions webpage, be prepared to provide the following information:

§ Name(s) of author(s)
§ Affiliation(s) of author(s)
§ The preferred address, phone number, and email address for notification
§ The title of the paper
§ A note indicating your equipment requirements
§ An abstract of no more than 500 words
§ Any additional comments

In your abstract, clearly state the main point or argument of the paper. Briefly discuss the problem or research question in reference to previous research and the work's relevance to developments in your field. You may include a short example to support your main point or argument. Be sure to state your conclusions, however tentative.

Please write your abstract in language accessible to a wide audience. Abstracts will be anonymously reviewed by scholars from a variety of fields including (but not limited to) anthropology, applied linguistics and sociology. Papers will be accepted based on reviewers' evaluations of these anonymous abstracts.

Deadline for the receipt of abstracts is Friday, March 3, 2006. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notification of selection decisions will be sent via email in March 2006.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:09 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Division on Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing, 2006 MLA

Here are the Division on Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing topics for the 2006 MLA Convention. Please send your proposal to the person chairing the session; you can submit to more than one session, although if you're selected for both, I assume you'd be asked to choose one. If your paper is accepted, you will have to become a member of the MLA by April 1.
Craig Howes
=======================================

1. Theorist Autobiographers. Autobiographical works by writers known as theorists, and/or life-writing that develops theoretical argument (e.g. Augustine, Confessions; Montaigne, essays; Wordsworth, Prelude; Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman; Derrida, Circumfession; Sedgwick, Dialogue on Love). 250-word abstracts by March 10 to Carolyn Williams (carolyn.williams@rutgers.edu).

2. Life Writing and Humor. Parody, irony, and satire as modes for understanding and interrogating life writing genres. Self-deprecation or mockery as strategies for identity construction. Lives of comic writers, artists, performers. 250-word abstracts by March 10 to Craig Howes (craighow@hawaii.edu)

3. Auto/Graphics after Maus. Interaction between word and image; construction of personae through documents, portraits, anecdotes; narration and layout of time, space, history; "graphic" content as well as form. 250-word abstracts by March 10 to Gillian Whitlock (g.whitlock@uq.edu.au)

Craig Howes
Director, Center for Biographical Research
Editor, _Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly_
Professor of English
1733 Donaghho Road
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Honolulu, Hawai'i 96822
Phone: 808-956-3774 Fax: 808-956-3774
E-mail: craighow@hawaii.edu, or biograph@hawaii.edu
Home Page: www.hawaii.edu/biograph

Posted by prolurkr at 04:24 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Children's Digital Literature and Culture at 2006 MLA

"Children's Digital Literature and Culture"
Children's Literature Association Sponsored Session
2006 MLA Convention
Philadelphia, December 27-30, 2006

This panel will explore intersections of children's literature and culture in digital media, including video games, websites, online diaries and blogs, software (like learning games, Flash games, Living Books), online libraries, and similar digital texts. In doing so, the panel will investigate how these media impact children's literature and culture, including digital media that complements traditional children's literature such as websites by authors and video game tie-ins. Examples include Jane Yolen's single author blog and Neil Gaiman's blog which he updates daily and where readers of all ages can post comments, as well as same-story versions of children's texts that are adapted for multiple media such as The Polar Express and Lemony Snicket, which have texts, movies, websites, and video games.

The panel will also examine how different media (blogs, webpages, video games, digital libraries, iPods, GPS, etc) impact and alter children's literature and culture. By investigating these media we will see how children's culture has become a multi-media and multi-disciplinary field of inquiry into childhood and literature. Possible media topics could include:
1. Video games for children
2. Digital libraries
3. Blogs
4. Plug N Play gaming systems
5. ESRP Game Rating System
6. Educational gaming systems (Leapfrog)
7. Misc digital media (iPod, GPS)

Or, submissions can focus on a particular aspect within a specific media that relates to children or youth. These could include:
1. digital media and gender
2. digital media and race
3. digital media and children as consumers
4. digital media and the environment
5. digital media and policy/politics
6. digital media and history

DEADLINE: By March 1, 2006, submit 1-2 page abstracts or 8-page papers via email to _cmartin@english.ufl.edu.

Or through mail:

Cathlena Martin
University of Florida
Department of English
4008 Turlington Hall
PO Box 117310
Gainesville, FL 32611
cmartin@english.ufl.edu

Posted by prolurkr at 04:15 PM | TrackBack

CFP - VisionFest

100 of the top student animators and artists will be selected to compete in this student animation festival. VisionFest is a juried student competition and conference created to share work in animation, sequential art, simulation, and visualization, and to receive feedback from peers and professionals. The festival includes panel discussions, opportunities to network with industry and fellow visionaries, and multiple screenings of student work in an atmosphere celebrating the art of animations. Visit www.visionfest.org for competition guidelines and information.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:17 AM | TrackBack

CFP - AMCIS Virtual Communities mini-track

Virtual Community is a well differentiated and well established business model. Examples for Virtual Communities range from Communities of Interest, Communities of Relationship, Gaming Communities, and Communities of Transaction to Peer-to-Peer Communities or Mobile Communities. Within the field of information systems sciences we are looking at interaction patterns, transaction processes, management aspects, business models, and design aspects of information systems and services for Virtual Communities. Community members interact via digital media and contribute value in the form of content, reviews, and recommendations. Related issues are trust, network effects, transaction costs and the design of services. Well-organized communities even expand their power across various channels and into the off-line world.

We call for papers on social as well as business communities. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Social, political and economic impact of Virtual Communities
• Community models, platforms, services, and interactions, multi-channel communities
• Management and organizational behavior of communities
• Community-related business models
• Transaction-oriented Virtual Communities, Customer collaboration
• Peer-to-Peer or mobile services for Virtual Communities
• Case studies and empirical studies, best practices and lessons learned

This mini-track builds on the success of the preceding AMCIS mini-tracks on Virtual Communities. During the last five years we have been gathering a community of researchers who are interested in the field of Virtual Communities and related issues. Information on last years? mini-tracks is available at: http://www.e-business.fhbb.ch/amcis

Please visit the mini-track websites at http://www.e-business.fhbb.ch/amcis

GUIDELINES FOR PAPER SUBMISSION
1. Submit abstracts via email to the appropriate mini-track chair(s) by February 1, 2006.
2. Submit final papers via the AIS Review System by March 1, 2006 http://reviews.aisnet.org/AMCIS2006.
3. Authors can submit multiple papers but in general may present only once during the conference.
4. Copyright Information: Submission of a paper to AMCIS2006 represents the author's agreement to allow AIS to publish the paper in any written or electronic format for distribution to all interested parties in perpetuity with or without compensation to AIS and without compensation to the author. The parties understand that the author is granting a nonexclusive
license and all copyrights remain the property of the author.

Mini-track Chair Information:
Please use the following email-address for all inquiries:
amcis@virtual-community.org

Ulrike Lechner (contact)
Universität der Bundeswehr München
Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39
D-85577 Neubiberg, Germany
Ulrike.Lechner@unibw.de
http://wi.informatik.unibw-muenchen.de

Jan Marco Leimeister
Technische Universität München
Boltzmannstr. 3
D-85748 Garching b. München, Germany
leimeister@in.tum.de
http://www.winfobase.de/

Achim Dannecker
Universität der Bundeswehr München
Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39
D-85577 Neubiberg, Germany
Achim.Dannecker@unibw.de
http://wi.informatik.unibw-muenchen.de

Posted by prolurkr at 07:35 PM | TrackBack

CFP - THE CURRENT STATE OF LITERARY SEMIOTICS

THE CURRENT STATE OF LITERARY SEMIOTICS
Imatra, Finland, June 10-13, 2006
Organizer: International Semiotics Institute (ISI)

Call for papers

During the past 10 years, literary semiotics has entered into a new phase of development. The pragmatic theory of semiotics based on Charles Peirce's writings is increasingly applied to the analysis of literary texts, thus giving shape to new forms of research and to a new theory of how literature should be understood. At the same time, important interdisciplinary approaches such as research on iconicity, queer studies, performance theory, and cognitive studies focus on questions of signification and sign, shedding a new light on semiotic processes in literature. There is, however, also continuity in this renewal since a great part of the analytical concepts and research methods currently in use are derived from (post)structural research.

The time is thus ripe for a reflection on the current state of literary semiotics. Are we witnessing the emergence of a new paradigm? If yes, what kind of research does it produce? Is it time to transcend earlier divisions between competing paradigms and to look for a synthesis in literary semiotics? Which elements in (post)structural research are still valuable? We invite all scholars interested in literary semiotics to reflect on the current state of the art according to the lines of inquiry proposed by these and related questions. The issues can be addressed from a theoretical or a methodological point of view. Readings and interpretations of individual texts that exemplify different paradigms are also welcome.

Invited lecturers: Jørgen Dines Johansen (University of Southern Denmark, Odense), Christina Ljungberg (University of Zürich) and Louis Armand (Charles University, Prague). Director: Harri Veivo (University of Helsinki/Finnish Network University of Semiotics)

The seminar is part of the annual International Summer School for Semiotic and Structural Studies organised by the International Semiotics Institute (ISI), which takes place on June 10-15, 2006.

Categories of Participation and Conditions of Admission:
There are two categories of participation:
1) Active: Participant presenting a paper in the seminar.
2) Passive: Participant following the seminar without presenting a paper.

An active participant must send a short curriculum vitae and a one page abstract of his/her paper together with the registration form to the ISI (address given below). Registration forms can be filled in electronic form at the ISI website (www.isisemiotics.fi) or ordered from the ISI. Abstract, cv and registration form should reach the organizers no later than March 31, 2006. The abstracts will be published as a booklet and should be sent both as a Word-document (email attachment or on diskette) and in hard copy.

A passive participant must send the registration form by April 30, 2006. Participation Fee: 125 EUR (the fee covers lunch and two coffees a day from 11.-15.6. and an elegant evening reception and buffet on June 10th). Payment of fees must be made before April 30 by bank transfer to the ISI bank account with Sampo Bank. The bank identifier code is: PSPBFIHH. The international bank account number is: FI8780001802071697. In Finland, the bank account number is Sampo 800018-2071697.

You are also encouraged to visit the ISI Internet website (www.isisemiotics.fi) for the most up to date information as it becomes available.

For further information, please contact:
Harri Veivo, harri.veivo@helsinki.fi

For registration, please contact:
International Semiotics Institute, Virastokatu 1, 55100 Imatra, Finland
tel. +358-5-681 6639, fax +358-5-681 6696
e-mail: Maija.Rossi@isisemiotics.fi, Anna.Mennola@isisemiotics.fi

Posted by prolurkr at 07:13 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Fibreculture Journal 2006

:: fibreculture:: has established itself as Australasia's leading forum for discussion of internet theory, criticism, and research. The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed journal that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. Themes of recent issues of the journal have included: Contagion and the Diseases of Information; Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour; and Mobility, New Social Intensities and the Coordinates of Digital Networks. Issues currently in process are: Distributed Aesthetics (to be launched December 2005); Games Networks; and New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies.

Papers are other relevant works are invited for a General Issue of the Fibreculture Journal, to be published in the second half of 2006. Proposed contributions should fall within the ambit of the Fibreculture Journal=92s interests, as below.

There are guidelines for the format and submission of contributions at . These guidelines need to be followed in all cases. Contributions should be sent electronically, as attachments, to Andrew Murphie at a.murphie@unsw.edu.au. Articles not conforming to the Fibreculture Journal's style guide may not be considered. It is also the case that, although the Fibreculture Journal editors will often work to edit manuscripts, we are not always able to publish articles that require extensive editing in order to conform to the standards of the journal.

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2006.

The Fibreculture Journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of:

:: information and creative industries
:: national strategies for innovation, research and development
:: education
:: media and culture, and
:: new media arts

The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices.

Posted by prolurkr at 05:51 PM | TrackBack

CFP - 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem

We are happy to announce the public availability of a substantial collection of blog data for research purposes. The data is being made available by Intelliseek/BlogPulse in conjunction with the 3rd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem. A DVD containing full text from nearly 1 million blogs can be requested by filling out the form at the workshop homepage: http://www.blogpulse.com/www2006-workshop/

The release comprises a complete set of weblog posts for three weeks in July 2005 (on the order of 10M posts from 1M weblogs). This data set has been selected as it spans a period of time during which an event of global significance occurred, namely the London bombings. The data set includes the full content of the posts plus metadata in an easy to parse XML format. The metadata fields include: date of posting, time of posting, author name, title of the post, weblog url, permalink, tags/categories, and outlinks classified by type.

Much of the interest in research relating to weblogs involves the analysis of large quantities of data. As part of this workshop, we are very excited to provide a data set to the research community. The aim is to encourage the use of this data to focus the various views and analyses of the blogosphere over a common space. This will provide a unique opportunity to compare different views of the blogosphere and to stimulate interesting discussion and collaboration.

Researchers are welcome to concentrate on whatever aspects of the data they are interested in. Possible topics include:
- Topic detection and tracking
- Relation of blog data to other media
- Social network analysis
- Qualitative analysis of small scale interactions
- Sentiment detection
- Search tools
- Detection of spam blogs
- Correlation of weblog events to "real-world" data (e.g. the stock market)
- Clustering and ontology creation
- Measures of influence
- Visualization and mapping of the blogosphere

Please note that we welcome any submissions to the workshop, not just those making use of the data. Feel free to contact the committee with any questions you may have.
Eytan Adar, University of Washington
Natalie Glance, Intelliseek & BlogPulse
Matthew Hurst, Intelliseek & BlogPulse

Posted by prolurkr at 03:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - SYMPOSIUM ON TECHNOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY

SYMPOSIUM ON TECHNOLOGY, KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIETY

McGill University, Montreal Canada 9-10 June 2006

http://www.Technology-Conference.com

The symposium will take a broad and cross-disciplinary approach to technology in society. Participants will include researchers, teachers and practitioners whose interests are either technical or humanistic, or whose work crosses over between the applied technological and social sciences.

A special theme of this symposium will be the complex relations between Technology and Citizenship. Technology is deeply implicated in the organisation and distribution of social, political and economic power. Technological artefacts, systems and practices arise from particular historical situations, and they condition subsequent social, political and economic identities, practices and relationships. In short, industrial technology, transportation technology, information and communication technology, learning technology, bio and genetic technology, nanotechnology, etc.-is a matter in which citizenship is at stake. This symposium is dedicated to exploring the various ways in which technology and citizenship bear upon each other historically, and in the present context.

We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the symposium call for papers. The symposium will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations. Papers submitted by participants will be peer-refereed and published, if accepted by the referees, in print and electronic formats in the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society. If you are unable to attend the symposium in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this fully refereed academic journal, as well as access to the electronic version of the journal (including all historical material). The deadline for the first round of the call for papers is 15 JANUARY 2006. Proposals are reviewed within four weeks of submission.

Full details of the symposium, including an online call for papers form, are to be found at the symposium website - http://www.Technology-Conference.com.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:49 PM | TrackBack

Call for Participants - Media Ethics Colloquium

Media Ethics Colloquium at the University of St. Thomas

Call for Participants

As part of a decade-long series aimed at enhancing scholarship in applied media ethics, the University of St. Thomas will host the 2006 colloquium October 14-17 in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. The colloquium - the seventh of the series - will feature 12 fellows working in teams of two to explore the moral dimensions of the question: Who is a journalist? Selected fellows will receive an honorarium and travel expenses. During the colloquium, fellows will present their work to each other and solicit feedback. A group of fellows will also speak at a public symposium at the colloquium's end. Papers that result from the colloquium will be published in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics in 2007.

Applicants may apply as individuals (in which case colloquium organizers will pair them with another applicant) or as part of already formed teams. In the selection process, reference will be given to teams that combine disciplines or that include a junior scholar working with a senior scholar.

The guidelines are general and should not be seen as exhaustive or exclusive. Individuals who have previously participated as fellows are invited to apply, although preference may be given to first-time participants.

Applications for fellowships should include the following:
* A brief (500 word) abstract of a paper proposal.
* A curriculum vitae
* If appropriate, a notation of the desired team member

The deadline for proposals is April 1, 2006. Send paper or electronic submissions to:
Wendy N. Wyatt
Department of Journalism and Mass Communication University of St. Thomas
Mail #4372
2115 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55105
Phone inquiries: 651-962-5253
E-Mail: wnwyatt@stthomas.edu

Posted by prolurkr at 03:40 PM | TrackBack

CFP - SUNBELT SOCIAL NETWORK CONFERENCE XXVI (long post warning)

INTERNATIONAL SUNBELT SOCIAL NETWORK CONFERENCE XXVI

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

24-30 April 2006

The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference XXVI, sponsored by the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) will take place in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with Symposia on April 24-25, Workshops April 25-26, Papers April 26-30, 2006.

Workshops are scheduled to start on Tuesday, April 25 in the afternoon and continue Wednesday, April 26 in the morning. General paper sessions will begin on Wednesday the 26th in the afternoon and finish on Sunday, the 30th.

The Keynote Speaker will be Edward Laumann, and a plenary lecture will be given by the winner of the first Visual Path competition.

PLANNED SESSIONS

We invite you to propose or chair a session by letting us know at your earliest convenience via insna@sfu.ca.

To chair a session, please select from the list below or propose a topic of your interest that isn't on the list.

• Algorithms and Analytic Methods
• Applications of p*
• Characteristics of Ethnic Personal Nets
• Co-Evolution of Knowledge Networks
• Cognition and Networks
• Collecting Network Data
• Computer Networks as Social Networks
• Corporate and Inter-Organizational Networks
• Deviant and Criminal Networks
• Dynamics of social networks
• Evolution of Social Networks
• Focus on the Alters
• Infectious Diseases and Social Networks
• Informant Accuracy
• Innovation
• Interlocking Directorates
• International Networks
• Intra-Organizational Networks
• Kinship and Family Networks
• Large Scale Networks
• Mathematical Models
• Mergers, Alliances and Partnerships
• Methods and Statistics
• Micro-Macro Link
• Network Visualization
• Networks and Game Theory
• Networks and Infectious Diseases
• Networks and Science
• Networks and Social Systems
• Networks Through Time
• Networks, Collective Action & Social Movements
• New Analytic Answers
• On-Line Communities
• Partnership, Cooperation, Competition
• Personal Community Networks
• Politics and Networks Structures
• Powerful Experiments
• Research using position generator
• Sex, Diseases and Networks
• Social Capital
• Social Influence and Diffusion
• Social Support
• Status, Wealth, Power and Control
• The Individual Networks of Managers
• Trust, Uncertainty and Advantage
• Women, Men and Research Networks

CONFERENCE HOTEL

The conference will be held at the Coast Plaza Hotel & Suites at Stanley Park, 1763 Comox St. The hotel is located in Vancouver's trendy West End which offers the convenience and flavor of its true neighborhood. Over looking English Bay and Stanley Park the hotel is close to a variety of specialty restaurants, shops and services.

Make a room reservation on the Sunbelt conference page by clicking on Hotel Registration. To get the conference rate, enter "network" where the form says "Booking code". The room prices quoted below are in $CDN.

Comfort Room - $165 Single/ Double

One Bedroom Suite - $185 Single/ Double

*** Conference rates for the hotel are in effect (3) days pre and post event (reservation in advance will be required) ***

CONFERENCE BANQUET

A banquet that you will enjoy, remember, and probably write home about will be held at 6:00 PM on Thursday, April 27th. US$55

WORKSHOPS (not a final list)

Wouter de Nooy, Andrej Mrvar, and Vladimir Batagelj

-- Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek

Stephen Borgatti and Martin Everett

-- Introduction to the Analysis of Network Data via UCINET, Pajek and NetDraw

Barry Wellman

-- Networks for Newbies

Andrew Seary and Bill Richards

-- Multinet

Allen Tien, Chris McCarty, Emmanuel Koku, and Paul Broome

-- SocioMetrica Suite -- EgoNet, LinkAlyzer, VisuaLyzer

Christian Steglich

-- The Analysis of Longitudinal Social Network Data or Dynamics of Networks and Behaviour

Garry Robins, Pip Pattison, Dave Hunter (Penn State), maybe others from the

University of Washington

-- p* and statnet (which among other things can estimate the models)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Abstracts are to be submitted electronically via the Sunbelt XXVI website (go to www.insna.org, click Sunbelt XXVI, click Abstract Subission), and need to be received no later than January 16th, 2006.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Sunbelt XXVI Local Committee (first incarnation)
Bill Richards insna@sfu.ca
Sheila McCarthy spmcc@shaw.ca
Timothy R. Huerta tim.huerta@ttu.edu

Posted by prolurkr at 09:00 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Blogtalk Reloaded

Following the international success of BlogTalk 1.0 and 2.0, Blogtalk Reloaded is expanding its focus to Social Software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative scholars who study social software, users in corporate and educational settings, and the general community of users.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the conference. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• form and consequences of emerging social software practices
• social software in an enterprise/educational environment
• political impact of social software
• applications, protoypes, concepts, standards

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and be understandable for all groups alike.

Along those lines we will offer 3 different tracks.

1. academic
2. developer
3. cases/practitioner reports

For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn.

Please send your submission along with some personal info - as a plain email text (no html our automatic processing will not accept html-mails or attachments) - to call@blogtalk.net. You will receive a confirmation of our receiving your submission within 3 working days.

• Submission deadline is April 1, 2006
• Length: not more than 500 words
• Timeline and important Dates:
• Proposal submission deadline: April 1st, 2006
• Notification of acceptance or rejection: June 15th, 2006
• Paper version due: August 31st, 2006
• Presentations and abstracts on website due: September 27th, 2006
• The conference will be held from Oct.2-3, 2006

We will work hard to endow a fund for supporting travel costs. As soon as we review all of the papers we will be able to announce more details.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

CFP - CULTURAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION (CATaC'06)

International Conference on
CULTURAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION (CATaC'06)
28 June - 1 July 2006
University of Tartu, Estonia
http://www.catacconference.org

Conference theme:
Neither Global Village nor Homogenizing Commodification:
Diverse Cultural, Ethnic, Gender and Economic Environments

The biennial CATaC conference series continues to provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of current research on how diverse cultural attitudes shape the implementation and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The conference series brings together scholars from around the globe who provide diverse perspectives, both in terms of the specific culture(s) they highlight in their presentations and discussions, and in terms of the discipline(s) through which they approach the conference theme.

The 1990s' hopes for an "electronic global village" have largely been shunted aside by the Internet's explosive diffusion. This diffusion was well described by Marx - all that is solid melts into air - and was predicted by postmodernists. The diffusion of CMC technologies quickly led to many and diverse internets. A single "Internet", whose identity and characteristics might be examined as a single unity, has not materialised. An initially culturally and gender homogenous Internet came more and more to resemble an urban metropolis. Along the way, in the commercialization of the Internet and the Web, "cultural diversity" gets watered down and exchanges strong diversity for a homogenous interchangeability. Such diversity thereby becomes commodified and serves a global capitalism that tends to foster cultural homogenization.

CATaC'06 continues our focus on the intersections of culture, technology, and communication, beginning with an emphasis on continued critique of the assumptions, categories, methodologies, and theories frequently used to analyse these. At the same time, CATaC'06 takes up our characteristic focus on ethics and justice in the design and deployment of CMC technologies. We particularly focus on developing countries facilitated by "on the ground" approaches in the work of NGOs, governmental agencies, etc., in ways that preserve and foster cultural identity and diversity. By simultaneously critiquing and perhaps complexifying our theories and assumptions, on the one hand, and featuring "best practices" approaches to CMC in development work, on the other hand, CATaC'06 aims towards a middle ground between a putative "global village" and homogenizing commodification. Such middle ground fosters cultural diversity, economic and social development, and more successful cross-cultural communication online.

Original full papers (especially those which connect theoretical frameworks with specific examples of cultural values, practices, etc.: 10-20 pages) and short papers (e.g. describing current research projects and preliminary results: 3-5 pages) are invited.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:

• Culture isn't 'culture' anymore
• The Internet isn't the 'Internet' anymore
• Gender, culture, empowerment and CMC
• CMC and cultural diversity
• Ethics and justice
• Free/Open technology and communication
• Internet research ethics
• Cultural diversity and e-learning

SUBMISSIONS
All submissions will be peer reviewed by an international panel of scholars and researchers and accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings. Submission of a paper implies that it has not been submitted or published elsewhere. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to present the paper at the conference.

Full papers (10-20 formatted pages) - 13 February 2006
Short papers (3-5 formatted pages) - 20 February 2006
Workshop submissions - 20 February 2006
Notification of acceptance - mid March 2006
Final formatted papers - 29 March 2006

There will be the opportunity for selected papers from this 2006 conference to appear in special issues of journals. Papers in previous conferences have appeared in journals (Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronique de Communication, AI and Society, Javnost- The Public, and New Media and Society) and a book (Culture, Technology, Communication: towards an Intercultural Global Village, 2001, edited by Charles Ess with Fay Sudweeks, SUNY Press, New York). You may purchase the conference proceedings from the 2002 and 2004 conference from www.it.murdoch.edu.au/catac.

CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS
Charles Ess, Drury University, USA, catac@it.murdoch.edu.au
Fay Sudweeks, Murdoch University, Australia, catac@it.murdoch.edu.au
PROGRAM CHAIR
Herbert Hrachovec, University of Vienna, Austria
CONFERENCE CO-VICE-CHAIRS
Pille Runnel, Tartu University, Estonia

Posted by prolurkr at 01:48 PM | TrackBack

Dates BlogHer Conference '06

BlogHer Conference '06
Friday July 28 and Saturday July 29, 2006
San Francisco Bay Area

Posted by prolurkr at 02:34 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Grace Hopper Celebration 2005

The call for participation for the Grace Hopper Celebration has been announced. Co-founded by Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney in 1994 and inspired by the legacy of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) Of Women In Computing Conference is designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is the largest technical conference for women in computing and results in collaborative proposals, networking and mentoring for junior women and increased visibility for the contributions of women in computing. Conference presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industry, academia and government. Top researchers present their work while special sessions focus on the role of women in today's technology fields.

Electronic submissions will be accepted beginning February 1, 2006.

Categories and deadlines for submission are:

• PhD Forum - March 1, 2006 deadline
• Workshops and Panels - March 1, 2006 deadline
• Technical Posters - March 1, 2006 deadline
• Student Research Competition (SRC) - March 1, 2006 deadline
• Birds of a Feather Sessions (BOFs)
• New Investigator Technical Papers

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2006, October 3-7, 2006 San Diego, CA, is the sixth in a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities. Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today's technology fields.

Past Grace Hopper Celebrations have resulted in collaborative proposals, networking, mentoring, and increased visibility for the contributions of women in computing. This year's theme is Making Waves.

For more information contact information@anitaborg.org

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Posted by prolurkr at 02:27 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Console-ing Passions, the international conference on television, video, audio, and new media

Console-ing Passions, the international conference on television, video, audio, and new media, invites submissions for the 2006 conference to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

Dates: May 25-27th, 2006
Conference Location: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Founded in 1989 by a group of feminist media scholars and artists, Console-ing Passions, works to create collegial spaces for new work and scholarship on culture and identity in television and related media, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. Since 1992, Console-ing Passions conferences have featured new research on feminist perspectives, including race and ethnicity, post-colonialism, queer studies, globalization, national identity, fusion genres, the social and cultural insertion of new media, the historical development of media, and an ongoing feminist concern with gender dynamics in the production and consumption of electronic media.

Console-ing Passions emphasis on electronic media reflects its mission to provide an alternative scholarly space to those centered on film; papers or projects that include film as part of a larger perspective are welcome but non-film media are the primary focus.

Proposal Submissions:

Individual Papers: Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words.

Panels: Please submit a rationale for the panel (3-4 papers) of no more than 150 words, as well as abstracts of 500 words for each paper.

Workshops: Please submit a rationale for the workshop (a series of short, informal presentations on a related topic, meant to encourage discussion), along with individual abstracts of no more than 200 words.

Screenings of video, audio, or new media work: Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words.

All submissions must include an email message with the following information: name, affiliation, email address, and telephone number for the author, panel or workshop organizer, or producer/director for screenings. Email message should also specify the audio/visual materials needed for the presentation. Please be as specific about a/v needs as possible.

Preferred format for all proposals is PDF (attached to email message). Attachments saved as MS Word files will also be accepted. All identifying information should be omitted from the attachment for the purpose of blind review.

Please submit all proposals to cptv@uwm.edu.

Deadline for receipt of proposals is December 15, 2005.

Please direct all questions about the conference and the submission process to cptv@uwm.edu. See the Console-ing Passions website: http://www.cp.commarts.wisc.edu/home/index.htm for more information about Console-ing Passions and the 2006 conference.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:01 PM | TrackBack

Submission Deadline Extended: The Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

Submission Deadline Extended: The Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

As we have received increasing requests for extending the deadline for submitting papers, we have decided that the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will continue to accept paper proposals until JANUARY 15, 2006. Please visit our conference website http://www.qi2006.org for more information.

The Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, May 4-6, 2006.

The theme of the Second International Congress, "Ethics, Politics and Human Subject Research" builds on and extends the theme of the First International Congress which focused on Qualitative Inquiry in a Time of Global Uncertainty. The 2006 Congress will explore experiences with and criticisms of Institutional Review Boards. It will question the over-reliance of audit cultures on evidence-based, neo-experimental models of inquiry. The 2006 Congress will investigate new ways of decolonizing traditional methodologies. It will take up performative, feminist, indigenous, democratic and participatory forms of critical inquiry. The 2006 Congress will examine how these new forms of inquiry can advance the goals of social justice and progressive politics in this new century.

Thank you for your attention
QI 2006
http://www.qi2006.org

Posted by prolurkr at 12:16 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Internationalizing Internet Studies

Internationalizing Internet Studies (edited collection) by Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney) & Mark McLelland (University of Wollongong)

From the mid-1990s onwards, the Internet has shifted fundamentally from its co-ordinates in English-speaking countries, especially North America, to become an essential medium in a wide range of countries, cultures, and languages. . However, communications and media scholarship, especially in the Anglophone world, has not registered the deep ramifications of this shift - and the challenges it poses to the concepts, methods, assumptions, and frameworks used to study the Internet.

The vast body of Anglophone scholarship into 'the Internet' is predicated on research on and about English-language websites by academics and other researchers working and publishing in English. Despite the fact that there is also a large body of work being produced by scholars in non-English-speaking cultures and locales, hardly any of this work is being translated and it has had little impact on theorization of the developing fields of Internet and web studies.

The purpose of this anthology, 'Internationalizing Internet Studies', is to acknowledge that Internet use and Internet studies take place 'elsewhere' in various national and international contexts. We seek to uncover how non-Anglophone uses of the Internet might challenge certain preconceived notions about the technology and its social impacts as well as the manner in which Internet studies is taken up, valued and taught. Through bringing together researchers whose daily experience of the Internet is mediated through non-Anglophone
languages and cultures as well as researchers situated within the Anglophone academy whose work focuses on cultures outside North America and Europe, we hope to promote the visibility of work already being done outside the Anglophone world. Accordingly, we wish to gather together a distinctive collection of contributors who can illuminate the key features of the Internet's internationalization, surveying exemplary Internet language groups and cultures.

We are also interested in contributions that reflect upon this cosmopolitan turn in the Internet, and what it signifies for Internet studies.

Contributions would be welcomed, but are not restricted to, the following topics:

• non-anglophone language communities use of the Internet
• Asian countries and communities use of the Internet (especially Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)
• mobility and the Internet: how the Internet is deployed by people on the move across borders
• use of the Internet by diasporic communities
• Internet use by minority language speakers in majority Anglophone and other language contexts
• Indigenous use of the Internet
• how particular Internet, mobile and wireless technologies have been shaped and are used by different language and cultural groups
• how does this change our understanding of Internet cultures and cultural histories?
• what the implications of internationalizing of the Internet for debates concerning cultural citizenship and media diversity?
• how is Internet studies responding to the internationalizing of the Internet?

Timeframe:
Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to both editors outlining your proposed contribution to the edited collection by 31 January 2006. We will advise acceptance by 1 April 2006. We will be holding a workshop on 'Internationalizing Internet Studies' in Brisbane on 27 September 2006 immediately before the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Annual Conference 7.0, and hope that we will be able to invite some contributors to participate.

About the Editors:

From January 2006, Dr Gerard Goggin (g.goggin@uq.edu.au) will be an ARC Australian Research Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication, the University of Sydney. Recent books include Digital Disability (2003), Virtual Nation: The Internet in Australia (2004) and Cell Phone Culture (2006).

Dr Mark McLelland (m.mclelland@uq.edu.au) is a Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong. Recent Internet-related publications include Japanese Cybercultures (2003) and Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (2005).

Posted by prolurkr at 12:11 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Crossroads in Cultural Studies

Crossroads in Cultural Studies
Istanbul 2006
Open session: Gender and the Media

In 'More! New Sexualities in Girls' and Women's Magazines' (1999), McRobbie alludes to three phases in feminist critique of magazines. First, content reducing women to a passive category was rejected. Second, Althusserian theory emphasised the role of ideology in the exercise of power. Thirdly, post-structuralism pointed to subjectivity as a site of knowledge and power. Because subjectivity is constituted as an on-going process, discursive formations compete with each other for regulation of socially desirable forms of individuality. Contemporary representations of gender in the media repeat similar narratives so as to establish the limits for the mapping of subjectivity: by defining alterity, these representations confirm identity as natural.

This session invites papers on gender and the media, dealing with:

• Gender and Methodology
• Performative Languages of Gender
• Gender and Ideology
• Gender and its Others
• Liberal and Radical Feminism
• Public/Private Debates
• Gender and Staging Media Events

Paper proposals of 150 words to be submitted by Jan 31, 2006, to Claudia Alvares (Lusofona University) claudia.alvares@ulusofona.pt

Posted by prolurkr at 12:04 PM | TrackBack

CFP - WWW 2006

WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland
May 22, 2006
Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop
Call for Papers and Participation
URL: http://www.rawsugar.com/www2006/cfp.html
Contact: [frank AT rawsugar DOT com]

Chairs:
---------
Frank Smadja, RawSugar.
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo Research.
Scott Golder, HP Labs.

Program Committee:
-----------------------------
Eytan Adar, University of Washington.
Michael Cafarella, University of Washington
Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research
Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research
Jonathan Feinberg, IBM Research, Cambridge
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
R. Guha, Google
Yoelle Maarek, IBM Research, Haifa Israel.
Vova Soroka, IBM Research, Haifa Israel

Background
------------------
There has recently there been a great surge of interest in collaborative tagging as a means of facilitating knowledge sharing in social computing. Collaborative tagging refers to the process in which a community of users adds meta-information in the form of keywords or tags to Web content such as web pages, links, photographs and audio files on a centralized web server. While collaborative tagging is only starting to be researched in the research community, it seems to address a real need on the Web as demonstrated by the growing popularity of tagging and annotation sites (see del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, RawSugar, Shadows, etc.); the most popular sites already have a combined user base of several millions. The philosophy of what is called Web 2.0, the social Web or also the two-way Web is that users can and should be content creators as well as consumers and it suggests that there is a great deal of untapped potential for tagging to improve how web content is organized, navigated and experienced. Yet it is not yet clear how it will evolve and how it will scale, when, if at all, its usage base will go beyond early adopters. There are many open questions about what tagging can and cannot do, especially for a larger, mainstream web community and we
would like to explore that in our workshop.

Goal and Topics of Interests
-----------------------------------------
The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners together in order to explore both the social and technical issues and challenges involved in Web tagging. We plan to address not only the current state of collaborative tagging, and understand its attractiveness to early adopters but also discuss its future.

Topics of interest for the workshop include:
-------------------------------------------------------------
* Semantics and Vocabulary: How can collaborative tagging be used in the creation of ontologies and the semantic web? What are tagging's benefits and limitations in this domain? How can meaning be faithfully preserved when disparate tag sets are integrated? Is there a place in tagging for controlled vocabulary? Is it necessary to match synonymous tags, and if so, how can this be accomplished technically? Are there other mechanisms that can extend tagging to provide some of the capabilities of hierarchies without the drawbacks?
* Measurement: What is the structure of tagspace? What behavioral patterns do users display when tagging, and how can the entire space of objects and tags be understood and visualized?
* Standardization efforts: Although very little of this has been done currently, current services are somehow interoperable through the use of RSS or Atom feeds. What could be the benefits of tagging standards and what would they be?
* Scalable architecture for tagging: What will happen when millions of users will tag, how about hundreds of millions? What kind of architecture can deal with billions of objects? Can current tagging concepts be applied to such scales?
* Multimedia: Are there special considerations for tagging multimedia such as photos, videos and audio? Yahoo photos now already has over two billion photographs.
* Search and Navigation: How can tagging improve internet search? How are tags used as a mechanism for navigation and discovery of content?
* Discovery paradigms: How to search, browse a tagged universe? What is the use of faceted search, people search, etc.?
* Blogging: What is the relationship between tagging and blogging? How do these two methods of adding personalized organization to web content affect how that content is found, navigated, used and interpreted by others?
* Interfaces: Using Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT on sets of tags rapidly grows complex and confusing, especially for non-technical users. How can good interface design simplify and clarify these complex operations?

Workshop Presenter Selection Process:
---------------------------------------------------------
We will solicit submissions to present work to the workshop, and submissions will be evaluated by the organizing committee. Because collaborative tagging on the web is relatively young and has received relatively little scholarly attention, we encourage contributions from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, including computer science and engineering, sociology, anthropology and linguistics, and communications and library science. Despite the novelty of collaborative tagging, we seek contributions with demonstrable results, as well as purely theoretical pieces. These results may consist of designs and prototypes for future tagging systems, quantitative or qualitative analyses of existing systems, or solutions for technical challenges facing tagging. Though speculative or theoretical contributions will be considered, we will require that they be well-grounded in previous research or practice.

How to submit a paper/proposal for the workshop:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For research in progress work, each candidate will email to [frank AT
rawsugar DOT com] in PDF format:
* A short bio (less than one half page)
* A position paper or extended abstract (less than 5 pages) including references and figures. For system presentations/demos, each candidate will email to [frank AT rawsugar DOT com] in PDF format:
* A short bio (less than one half page)
* A description of the system to be demoed (less than 3 pages)
* If available, a demo of the system in some format.

Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee and invitations to present will be sent accordingly. Authors of accepted submissions will be requested to submit a longer version for inclusion in the Working Notes to be distributed during the workshop.

Format:
-----------
Papers should be emailed to [frank AT rawsugar DOT com] preferably in PDF format and alternatively in HTML or MS Word. Papers should be formatted according to the standard ACM templates available at http://www2006.org/cfp/submissions.php, for example the MS Word template is in http://www2006.org/cfp/www2006-submission.doc; and then converted to pdf. Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) can be used to export standard formats to PDF.

Important Dates:
-----------------------
Individual workshop submissions deadline: 10 January 2006
Acceptance notifications to authors of workshop papers: 1 February 2006
Final workshop program available: 15 February 2006
Workshop date: May 22 (Mon), 2006

Posted by prolurkr at 01:33 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Exploring Gender, Feminism and Technology from a Communication Perspective

Women's Studies in Communication invites submissions for a special issue on "Exploring Gender, Feminism and Technology from a Communication Perspective" to appear in September 2006. Across disciplines, studies of technology have been a rich source for understanding women's experience and for advancing feminist theory. The goal of this special issue is to emphasize the contribution of communication practice and/or theory in exploring this relationship. More specific themes within this general emphasis may include examination of women's uses of particular technologies, the gendered nature of technology, the effect of technologies (or technological culture and globalization) upon women's lives, and developing/critiquing feminist theories of technology. Any type of technology may be considered; although they are welcome, manuscripts need not be limited to communication and information technologies. Manuscripts may by theoretical, empirical, or descriptive. For empirical studies, we welcome the full range of methodologies. All manuscripts must be clearly labelled as submissions intended for this special issue and submitted following standard guidelines described at http://www.bk.psu.edu/faculty/ramsey/submissions.html. All submissions will be blind and peer reviewed. Informal enquiries are welcome and should be directed to WSIC Associate Editor Michele Jackson, jackson@colorado.edu . Submission deadline: February 1, 2006

Posted by prolurkr at 04:57 PM | TrackBack

CFP - ASIS&T 2006

ASIS&T 2006 - "Information Realities: Shaping the Digital Future for All"
November 3-9, 2006
Hilton Austin, Austin, Texas
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/am06call.html

ASIS&T 2006 challenges us to explore this moment in the history of information science as people seamlessly move between their physical and digital worlds to create information realities for themselves and others. Submissions by researchers and practitioners are solicited on a wide range of topics.

TYPE OF SUBMISSIONS
Contributed papers
Contributed posters/short papers
Practitioner/Industry track
Symposia and panels
Pre-conference sessions

Deadlines
February 13, 2006 Proposals due for contributed papers, technical sessions and panels, and pre-conference sessions
February 25, 2006 Proposals due for contributed posters/short papers
April 28, 2006 Acceptance notices issued
May 27, 2006 Final versions due for conference proceedings

WHERE AND HOW TO SUBMIT
Full Call for Papers is at http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/am06call.html
All submissions are made electronically via a link from the ASIS&T Web site (http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/AM06submit.html).
_____

Richard B. Hill
Executive Director
American Society for Information Science and Technology
1320 Fenwick Lane, Suite 510
Silver Spring, MD 20910
Fax: (301) 495-0810
Voice: (301) 495-0900

Posted by prolurkr at 04:32 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Succeeding Failure: openings in communication and media studies

Special issue of Communication Theory:

Succeeding Failure: openings in communication and media studies

Succeeding Failure: openings in communication and media studies is the title of a special issue planned for Communication Theory. This issue will be guest co-edited by Briankle G. Chang and Garnet C. Butchart of the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"Failure" typically implies a kind of breakdown, defeat, or impasse. However, "failure" may also be read as a productive concept, one that indicates an opening rather than a closure, a point of departure rather than a terminus. For example, whenever one thing is said but another is heard, it is the failure of, or discord within, such an exchange that enables one to question the possibility of communication to begin with. In this sense, failure succeeds. This special issue invites critical essays that interrogate the ways in which failure may open onto and succeed in generating innovative responses to pressing questions of theory, politics, and ethics as they relate to communication and media studies. Topics for critical reflection may include, but are not limited to:

• Aesthetics and arts
• Globalization and media
• Social interaction
• Identity and ethnicity
• Consciousness and language
• Subjectivity
• Freedom, privacy, and citizenship
• Hermeneutics
• Being and presence
• Alienation, recognition, and community
• Event, symptom, and truth
• Representation and ideology

Regardless of topic, submitted essays must offer a critical interrogation of the concept of failure as a productive entry point into the contemporary study of communication and media. Authors may submit inquires and manuscripts electronically to Briankle G. Chang at bchang@comm.umass.edu or to Garnet C. Butchart at garnet@comm.umass.edu.

Manuscripts should conform to the guidelines of Communication Theory and must be received by May 15, 2006 to be considered for this issue. The manuscript should include a title page with complete contact information (address, telephone, FAX, and email), as well as a brief biography (full name, highest earned academic degree, institution granting that degree, current academic title) for each author. Manuscripts must conform to the specifications of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.), and authors should verify that the reference list is complete and in appropriate form.

Posted by prolurkr at 03:18 PM | TrackBack

CFP - The Third International Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystems

CFP: 3rd International Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem (WWE 2006)
Edinburgh, UK
May 22 or 23rd (TBD) at the WWW 2006 conference
http://www.blogpulse.com/www2006-workshop/

Paper submission deadline: March 10, 2006
Author Notification: April 3, 2006

Introduction
The weblogging community continues to evolve: weblogs are gaining more and more exposure, the number of bloggers continues to grow and the contribution of individual bloggers is becoming significant and compelling. The dynamics of the blogosphere, found in trackbacks, citation links, blog-rolls, comments, tags, shared topics and interests provides a facinating domain of study for researchers from all academic and commercial fields including text mining, social network analysis, computational linguistics, business and marketing intelligence, library sciences, taxonometrics, graph theory and data visualization.

The workshop will build on the success of the previous two meetings, bringing together researchers from these diverse areas, working in both academic and commercial settings: contributors with a keen interest in an area with increasing technological, social, political and cultural impact. In addition to a regular track of research presentations, this year's workshop will feature the first ever weblog research data release. This data release will allow researchers access to a large coherent body of weblog post data for a specific time period. Researchers are encouraged to use this data set in the presentation of their research results at the workshop. We plan to compile the papers that focus on this data set into a book which will present an exciting view of a specific period of blogosphere history.

Areas of Interest
The weblogging phenomenon represents an exciting opportunity for many fields of research. Papers submitted to this workshop should be focus on one or more of the following topics:

• Mapping and visualization of the blogosphere
• Weblog taxonomies: automatic and/or manual construction, automatic classification of weblog entries
• Weblog tools: search, structured blogging, collaborative filtering
• Aggregate measures over the blogosphere
• Dynamics of information flow across the blogosphere
• Sociological analyses: methods for weblog census, weblog lifecycle
• Influence of the blogosphere on the information landscape
• Alternative blog forms (podcasting, moblogging, photoblogs, etc.)
• Text mining: topic detection, phrase mining, sentiment analysis, gender/age/demographic identification, spam filtering, topic trending/tracking, tag analysis
• Time series forecasting: predicting future trends based on blog content
• Social network analysis: influential bloggers, ranking, authority, centrality, community identification
• Document analysis for weblogs

Data Challange
Much of the interest in research relating to weblogs involves the analysis of large quantities of data. As part of this workshop, we are very excited to provide a data set to the research community. The aim is to encourage the use of this data to focus the various views and analyses of the blogosphere over a common space. This will provide a unique opportunity to compare different views of the blogosphere and to stimulate interesting discussion and collaboration. As a result of this exercise, we plan to publish a book containing the collected data challange papers.

The data release comprises a complete set of weblog posts for three weeks in July 2005 (on the order of 10M posts). This data set has been selected as it spans a period of time during which an event of global significance occurred, namely the London bombings.

The data set includes the full content of the posts plus mark-up. The marked-up fields include: date of posting, time of posting, author name, title of the post, weblog url, permalink, tags/categories, and outlinks classified by type - details may be found at the workshop homepage (see above).

Intelliseek, Inc. will facilitate the distribution of the data. To obtain a copy of the data, sign and fax the datashare individual agreement form to Intelliseek.

Paper Submission and Review
Please see the website for submission details.

Papers submitted to the workshop will undergo a peer review process overseen by the workshop co-chairs. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two program commitee members. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop by one of the authors and will be published in the WWW-2006 Workshops CD-ROM and online. Papers should not exceed 5000 words (approximately 12 pages) in length and must be submitted in PDF. Short papers (up to 6 pages) describing early research results are also welcome.

Posted by prolurkr at 03:59 PM | TrackBack

CFP - INTERACTING WITH COMPUTERS JOURNAL

CALL FOR PAPERS
INTERACTING WITH COMPUTERS JOURNAL

Special Issue of Interacting with Computers on "HCI Issues in Computer Games"
http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~zaphiri/Announcements/games.html

Guest Editors
Panayiotis Zaphiris & CS Ang,

Centre for HCI Design,
City University London

Introduction to special issue topic

Computer Games are at the forefront of technological innovation and their popularity in research is also increasing. Their wide presence and use makes Computer Games a major factor affecting the way people socialize, learn and possibly work. Computer Games are also beginning to attract the attention of educators and education technologists.

With this special issue of Interacting with Computers we wish to explore the relationship between Computer Games and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Are current HCI techniques and methodologies appropriate for designing Computer Games? Do we need new Computer Game focused HCI methods, theories and paradigms? What are the new challenges when it comes to evaluating Computer Games?

This special issue of Interacting with Computers is inviting contributions from both the academic community and industry. It will focus on issues surrounding the analysis, design, development and evaluation of Computer Games and the issues surrounding them. Potential topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Design approaches and techniques suitable for Computer Games
• Usability studies regarding Computer Games
• Theoretical and/or pedagogical foundations for analysing Computer Games
• Within-game and/or out-game activities and their HCI analysis
• Computer Games and Online Communities
• Social and Cultural Issues and Computer Games
• Accessibility of Computer Games
• Transfer of gaming metaphors to business applications

"Interacting with Computers" is an interdisciplinary journal of Human-Computer Interaction, published by Elsevier. More information about this journal can be found at: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/525445/description

IwC special issues contain only 5 - 6 papers, each of no more than 10,000 words (so acceptance will be fairly selective).

Submission:

Papers should be submitted through the manuscript management system at http://ees.elsevier.com/iwc/ by the 10th of April 2006. The style standard is that of the American Psychological Association (APA), more details about which can be obtained from: http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/DocAPAFormatting.html

Important dates:

• Full paper submission: 10th April 2006 (Monday)
• Response to authors: 8th May 2006 (Monday)
• Final version of papers: 5th June 2006 (Monday)
• Planned publication: September 2006

Dr. Panayiotis Zaphiris (zaphiri@soi.city.ac.uk) and CS Ang Centre for HCI Design, City University London, Guest Editors

Posted by prolurkr at 07:44 AM | TrackBack

CFP - IR 7.0: INTERNET CONVERGENCES

IR 7.0: INTERNET CONVERGENCES

INTERNET CONVERGENCES The Internet works as an arena of convergence. Physically dispersed and marginalized people (re)find themselves online for the sake of sustaining and extending community. International and interdisciplinary teams now collaborate in new ways. Diverse cultures engage one another via CMC. These technologies relocate and refocus capital, labor and immigration, and they open up new possibilities for political, potentially democratizing, forms of discourse. Moreover, these technologies themselves converge in multiple ways, e.g. in Internet-enabled mobile phones, in Internet-based telephony, and in computers themselves as "digital appliances" that conjoin communication and multiple media forms. These technologies also facilitate fragmentations with greater disparities between the information-haves and have-nots, between winners and losers in the shifting labor and capital markets, and between individuals and communities. Additionally these technologies facilitate information filtering that reinforces, rather than dialogically challenges, narrow and extreme views.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Our conference theme invites papers and presentations based on empirical research, theoretical analysis and everything in between that explore the multiple ways the Internet acts in both converging and fragmenting ways - physical, cultural, technological, political, social - on local, regional, and global scales. Without limiting possible proposals, topics of interest include:
- Theoretical and practical models of the Internet
- Internet convergence, divergence and fragmentation
- Networked flows of information, capital, labor, etc.
- Migrations and diasporas online
- Identity, community and global communication
- Regulation and control (national and global)
- Internet-based development and other economic issues
- Digital art and aesthetics
- Games and gaming on the Internet
- The Net generation
- E-Sectors, e.g. e-health, e-education, e-business

We call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community that address the theme of Internet Convergence. We particularly call for innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on and interrogations of the conference theme. However, we always welcome submissions on any topics that address social, cultural, political, economic, and/or aesthetic aspects of the Internet and related Internet technologies. We are equally interested in interdisciplinary proposals as well as proposals from within specific disciplines.

SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference papers, but we also encourage proposals for creative or aesthetic presentations that are distinct from a traditional written 'paper'. We welcome proposals for roundtable sessions that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, and we also welcome organized panel proposals that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme. This year AoIR will also be using an alternative presentation format in which a dozen or so participants who wish to present a short overview of their work to stimulate debate will gather together in a plenary session involving short presentations (no more than 5 minutes) and extended discussion. All papers and presentations in this session will be reviewed in the normal manner. Further information will be available via the conference submission website.

- PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- SHORT PRESENTATIONS - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- CREATIVE OR AESTHETIC PRESENTATIONS - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- PANELS - submit a 250-500 word description of the panel theme (and abstracts of the distinct papers or presentations)
- ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a 250-500 word statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction.

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each person is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. People may also propose a panel of papers or presentations, of which their personal paper or presentation must be a part. You may submit an additional paper/presentation of which you are the co-author as long as you are not presenting twice. You may submit a roundtable proposal as well. Detailed information about submission and review is available at the conference submission website http://conferences.aoir.org. All proposals must be submitted electronically through this site.

PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
All papers presented at the conference are eligible for publication in the Internet Research Annual, on the basis of competitive selection and review of full papers. Additionally, several publishing opportunities are expected to be available through journals, again based on peer-review of full papers. Details on the website.

GRADUATE STUDENTS
Graduate students are strongly encouraged to submit proposals. Any student paper is eligible for consideration for the AoIR graduate student award. Students wishing to be a candidate for the Student Award must also send a final paper by 31 July 2006.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
Prior to the conference, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquires regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to the Conference Chair and no later than 31 March 2006.

DEADLINES
Submission site available: 1 December 2005
Final date for proposal submission: 7 February 2006
Presenter notification: 21 March 2006
Final workshop submission deadline: 31 March 2006
Submission of paper for publication/student award: 31 July 2006
Submission of paper for conference archive: 30 September 2006

CONTACT INFORMATION
Program Chair: Dr Fay Sudweeks, Murdoch University, Australia, sudweeks@murdoch.edu.au
Conference Chair: Dr Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, a.bruns@qut.edu.au
President of AoIR: Dr Matthew Allen, Curtin University of Technology, Australia m.allen@curtin.edu.au
Association Website: http://www.aoir.org
Conference Website: http://conferences.aoir.org (from 1 December)

Posted by prolurkr at 07:18 AM | TrackBack

CFP - INFORMATICS GOES GLOBAL: METHODS AT A CROSSROADS

INFORMATICS GOES GLOBAL: METHODS AT A CROSSROADS
Indiana University, Bloomington
March 3-5. 2006

CALL FOR PAPERS AND FOR CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION

CONFERENCE OVERVIEW

How can studies of IT in use become worldwide, cohesive endeavors? What are the opportunities and challenges in broadening the Informatics research agenda? We invite you to the Indiana University School of Informatics in Bloomington for a two-day conference to address these issues. The program will feature paragon research in globalizing research on information technology while addressing methodological pitfalls.

AREAS OF FOCUS

The conference will address IT globalism in four areas, two in methodology and two on cases. The areas of methodology are (1) historiography and (2) ethnography. Specific methodological issues include but are not limited to the following:

• Critiques of bias (e.g., "Western") in existing Informatics research;
• Properly contextualizing research in non-Western spaces; or
• Creation of tools that foster international and global research.

The two cases are (1) free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS) and (2) intellectual property rights. Again, possible presentation topics include but are not limited to ethnographic or historical research on:

• Whether F/LOSS tends to make IT similar everywhere, or does it support independent cultural production;
• The extent to which F/LOSS advocacy and development lead to different social development dynamics from those fostered by proprietary approaches; or
• Whether the world is moving toward a single structure regarding intellectual property, and/or if it should.

You can participate in two ways: as a presenter/panelist or as a participant. All participation except for the opening plenary will be by invitation only; see the instructions below for submission procedures.

SCHEDULE AND PROCESS FOR PROSPECTIVE PRESENTERS/PANELISTS

We invite submissions for papers on the four areas listed above. Submissions will be reviewed in two rounds: abstract and full paper rounds. We anticipate that abstracts that are accepted will normally lead to accepted full papers for inclusion in the conference.

December 5, 2005: Abstracts due (about 500 words)

December 15, 2005: Authors notified of conference response to abstract

February 1, 2006: Full papers due (to be made available at the conference)

In addition to the usual abstract content--an overview of the research problem, argument, evidence, and method--please also include a statement of how your work fits into the broader agenda of globalizing informatics research.

We anticipate conference papers will be published, either in a proceedings volume from Indiana University Press in a new series on Informatics or in a special journal issue-e.g., The Information Society. In addition to consideration as a panelist/presenter, abstract submission also ensures priority consideration for conference participation.

SCHEDULE AND PROCESS FOR ALL PROSPECTIVE PARTICIPANTS

Because of space limitations, conference participation will be by invitation only. If you are interested in participating in the conference, please outline your interest in and perspective on making informatics research more global. Such expressions of interest should be about 200 words and should be submitted to David Hakken (dhakken@indiana.edu) by February 1, 2006.

CONFERENCE AT A GLANCE

Friday, March 3, 2006, 5 pm:

Opening Conference Plenary address by a distinguished globalization scholar and presentation of the position paper on Globalizing Informatics Research prepared by a subcommittee of the IU School of Informatics Globalization Committee.

Saturday, March 4, 2006:

9 am Opening case study panel (three presentations of 20-25 min, followed by discussion), on Intellectual Property Rights

10:30 Coffee

10:45 Workshops on issues in globalizing Informatics research, to be set up based on the substantive interests of conference participants.

12:15 Lunch (on participants' own)

2 pm Opening methodological panel (3 presentations) on Ethnographic Approaches

3:30 tea, sodas

3:45 Workshops on methodological issues.

5:15 adjourn for dinner (on participants' own)

Sunday, March 5, 2006

9 am Second case study panel On Free/Libre and Open Source Software

10: 30 break

10:45 Second methodological panel on Historical Approaches

12:15 Summary panel, on opportunities for globalizing research

1 pm conference adjourns

Posted by prolurkr at 09:42 AM | TrackBack

CFP - 3rd International Conference on Knowledge Management

To be held in the magnificant baroque World Heritage Site of the University of Greenwich, on the Thames in London, 1-2 August 2006, the 3rd International Conference on Knowledge Management will bring together academics, researchers, developers, practitioners and users in the areas of knowledge management and information processing. It will serve as a platform for networking, exchange of research ideas, practical applications and best practices.

Authors are invited to submit original and unpublished work on all aspects of information and knowledge management. Specific topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Social Network Analysis
• Developing the Knowledge Enterprise
• Stimulating Innovation and Creativity
• The Challenges of Complexity
• Tools &Technologies for Effective Knowledge Management
• The Reflective KM Practitioner
• Intangibles - their Management and Measurement
• Technologies for Knowledge Sharing
• Issues in Education and Training
• Case Studies on Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
• Social and Psychological Dimensions
• Knowledge Discovery (data mining, intelligent agents etc.)
• Knowledge Organization (taxonomies, metadata etc.)
• Knowledge Issues around Ageing Workforces
• Knowledge Management in Design

Published proceedings drawn from full papers submitted by February 28, 2006 will be available at the conference. Presenters will have the opportunity to submit their papers for the Journal of Information and Knowledge Management.

For further details see http://www.ickm2006.org/

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CFP - 2006 iDMAa + IMS Conference

2006 iDMAa + IMS Conference
< CODE >
Human Systems | Digital Bodies

We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released. - Jean Houston

April 6-8, 2006 (pre-conference tutorials, April 5)
Miami University, Oxford, OH

The International Digital Media and Arts Association and Miami University's Center for Interactive Media Studies presents the 2006 iDMAa + IMS Conference. The conference's theme is built around an examination of the many codes that drive the digital media and arts world. The Conference will bring academics, artists, and industry representatives together to help define, refine and advance the leading edge of new media. This is the third annual iDMAa Conference and fifth annual IMS Conference.

The conference will include refereed paper presentations, panels, discussion workshops, gallery talks, and performances. Pre-conference, hands-on tutorials (free for iDMAa members) will begin on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006. The conference will begin on April 6th and end on April 8th. The conference will also include a juried exhibition and a vendor fair. This conference is sponsored and hosted in Oxford, Ohio by Miami University's Center for Interactive Media Studies.

Speakers include:
Proctor & Gamble Virtual Reality Research and Development
Mary Flanagan: Artist; Inventor-Designer-Activist, NYC; Professor + Director, Tiltfactor Research Group, Hunter College
Casey Reas: Software Artist, Designer, Co-creator of the Processing Programming Language and Environment; Assistant Professor Department of Design | Media Arts, UCLA
Josh Bodnar: Lead Editor / Associate Creative Director, Digital Kitchen, Seattle
Walter Edward Jones: Vice President, Consulting Services, Nth Degree LLC, Atlanta

Panels on:
Code as Art
Accreditation and iDMAa
New Media Law
Promotion & Tenure in Interactive Media Studies
Conference Tracks

Track One: Art Code | Code Art
Sample Topics: Algorithmic Art, Software Art, Net Art, Installation Art, Physic Computing, Sonic Art, Interactive Design and Development

Track Two: Academic Code
Sample Topics: Curriculum Development, Promotion & Tenure, Program Development, Pedagogy, Technical Support and Funding, Inter-Institutional Collaboration, Digital Film
Schools, Classroom and Lab Exemplars, eTextbooks

Track Three: Image Code
Sample Topics: Digital Photography, Digital Imaging as Art, 3-D Modeling, Digital Printing, Medical Imaging, Commercial Design, Installation, Digital Painting

Track Four: Time-Based Code
Sample Topics: Digital Video, Flash, Processing, Distance Collaboration/Performance, Animation, Film, Interactive

Track Five: Cultural Code
Sample Topics: Network Culture and Complexity/Change, Philosophy, Digital Identity

Track Six: Legal Code
Sample Topics: Copyright, Legal Issues for Artists, P2P File Sharing, Open Source, Creative Commons

Track Seven: Semiotic Code & Storytelling
Sample Topics: Digital Narrative, Digital Asset Management, Still Image as Narrative, Semantic Web

Track Eight: Commercial Code
Sample Topics: Mobile Media, Emerging Technologies, Business Applications

Track Nine: Game Code
Sample Topics: Serious games, artistic games, commercial games, games as pedagogy, analysis of games

For conference and registration information: www.muohio.edu/codeconference < /CODE >

Posted by prolurkr at 01:01 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Narrative Matters 2006

NARRATIVE MATTERS 2006: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Narrative Research, Perspectives, Approaches, and Issues Across the Humanities and Social Sciences

THEME: The Storied Nature of Human Experience: Fact and Fiction
DATES: May 25-27, 2006
DEADLINE for proposals: Dec. 15, 2005
LOCATION: Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Dr. Robyn Fivush, Samuel Chandler Dobbs Professor of Psychology, Emory University, "Memory and Narrative, Self and Voice"
R. Murray Schafer, Composer, "And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon: The collective creation of a myth"
Bob Barton, Storyteller, "Making Stories Happen"

The inaugural Narrative Matters conference in 2002 drew 200 participants; the second in 2004 increased to 300. We now are calling for papers and proposals for the third conference in 2006. Our aim is to provide a forum for conversation among theorists, students, researchers, and practitioners using narrative perspectives in such diverse fields as literature, the social sciences, education, journalism, healthcare, psychology, history, and the fine arts.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in narrative modes of thought and expression. The Narrative Turn has influenced the humanities, the social sciences, and the health sciences. The third Narrative Matters conference, to be held at Acadia in 2006, will explore current ideas about narrative - or story - in various aspects of human experience.

Proposals are invited for papers, presentations, symposia or posters on a variety of topics from narrative in fiction to narrative modes of understanding human experience. We welcome proposals for papers and panels on topics that might include (but are not limited to) the following:

* The place of story in education, literature, politics, religion and the media
* Narrative and diversity (e.g., culture, ethnicity, gender, age)
* Collecting and analyzing stories as data in qualitative research
* Narrative perspectives on memory, identity, and community
* Narratives in therapeutic processes and relationships
* Narratives of place

Proposals, and the presentations themselves, can be in either English or French. Les propositions, ainsi que les communications elles-mêmes, peuvent être en anglais ou en français.

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL. http://narrativematters.com/dist.html

For More Information:
Pat O'Neill
Phone: (902) 542-7533
E-mail: narr-mat06@acadiu.ca

Related post: CFP - The Society for Text and Discourse

Posted by prolurkr at 08:48 PM | TrackBack

CFP - The Society for Text and Discourse

Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Society
Minneapolis, MN
July 13-15, 2006

The Society for Text and Discourse will hold its Sixteenth Annual Meeting at the Millennium Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, from Thursday through Saturday, July 13-15, 2006.

The specific aim of this conference will be to bring together behavioral scientists with scholars who are traditionally more focused on the structure of language, text, and discourse. One interest that many of these structure-oriented researchers share is their concern with the function, context, and process of language use. We therefore invite proposals for papers and symposia in this general area. The deadline for submitting proposals is February 1, 2006.

The Conference Site including the Call for Papers and Travel Information is located at http://std06.org/

Posted by prolurkr at 05:51 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Images and Communities

Images and Communities - Methodological Issues and Empirical Analysis of Mediated Societies At the Conference Media and Money, Helsinki 3-4 February 2005.

In this panel we want to provide a forum for a discussion of the methodological issues involved in empirical analysis of the linkage between images and community. We are not particularly interested in the image as an artefact, but rather in the image as a social relationship. The focus is on the role of mediated images and their alleged capacity to constitute communities of viewers in times when the conditions of late modernity undermine more conventional forms of bonding. The panel invites systematic reflection on methodological and conceptual issues. Proposals from non mainstream and non established perspectives are especially encouraged

Topics include, but are not limited to:
Concept development and the nature of evidence
Narrative epistemology
Communities in media age
Mapping who is doing what, where and how in research
Empirical research and post modern epistemologies: mission impossible?
The society of spectacle, global capitalism and information & communication technology
From the stone to the screen: notes for a short history in the uses of public communication

Submissions are considered for three types of presentations. Regular presentations - paper of 7000-8000 words, 20 minutes presentation, Round table presentations - position paper of 1000 words, 5-10 minutes Presentation "in absence" - regular paper not exceeding 7000-8000 words sent for circulation among participants. Authors will receive feedback after the conference. All the accepted papers will be considered for publication.

Abstracts should be sent to: Matteo Stocchetti at matteo.stocchetti@arcada.fi or Johanna Sumiala-Seppänen at johanna.sumiala-seppanen@helsinki.fi by 1st December, and a copy to mediatutkimus-2006@helsinki.fi

Posted by prolurkr at 02:54 PM | TrackBack

CFP - SALSA 2006

CALL FOR PAPERS: SALSA 2006

The Symposium About Language and Society-Austin is pleased to announce its 14th Annual Meeting to be held April 7-9, 2006 at the University of Texas at Austin. We encourage the submission of abstracts on research that addresses the relationship of language to culture and society. Desired frameworks include but are not limited to:

Linguistic Anthropology
Sociolinguistics
Ethnography of Communication
Language and Identity
Speech Play, Verbal Art, and Poetics
Language, Media, and Technology
Language and Social Interaction
Discourse Analysis & Conversation Analysis
Language Vitality
Language Socialization
Gesture and Talk in Interaction
Language and Politics

2006 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Kira Hall, University of Colorado at Boulder
John Haviland, Reed College
Susan Herring, Indiana University
Qing Zhang, University of Texas at Austin

Papers delivered at the conference will be published as a special edition of the Texas Linguistic Forum. Speakers will be allowed 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion. Papers will be selected on the basis of a blind review process.

Please send submissions to SALSA 2006 through the online submission form on the SALSA web page. All submissions must include TWO abstracts: An extended abstract not to exceed 4,100 characters and spaces (approximately 600 words), including references and examples; and a shorter abstracts not to exceed 1,100 spaces and characters (approximately 150 words). Please note that the online submission form does not accept special formatting or text such as IPA. Only electronic submissions sent through our online form will be accepted. The abstract submission system will be available beginning November 22, 2005. Each person is limited to ONE submission as the primary author; multiple submissions by the same first author will not be accepted.

Visit the SALSA web page for submission guidelines and conference details and to submit your abstract: http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/

Deadline for receipt of abstracts is Tuesday, JANUARY 17, 2006. Late submissions will not be accepted, and we cannot accept papers that are to be published elsewhere. Notification of acceptance will be sent in mid-February 2006. Pre-registration fees will be $25 for students and $50 for non-students, and on-site registration fees will be $30 for students and $60 for non-students.

Contact us at: SALSA
University of Texas at Austin
Department of Linguistics
1 University Station Stop B5100
Austin TX 78712-0198
email: salsaut@uts.cc.utexas.edu

Posted by prolurkr at 08:38 AM | TrackBack

CFP - THE ILLINOIS QUALITATIVE DISSERTATION AWARD

THE ILLINOIS QUALITATIVE DISSERTATION AWARD

The International Center for Qualitative Inquiry (IAQI) is pleased to announce the annual Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award, for excellence in qualitative research in a doctoral dissertation. This award will be made at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI 2006). At the same time, QI 2006 continues to welcome submission of papers and panels at http://www.qi2006.org.

Eligible dissertations will use and advance qualitative methods to investigate any topic.

An award of $500 will be given to the winner. All doctoral candidates are eligible, provided they have successfully defended their proposals prior to January 1, 2006, and will defend their final dissertation by April 1, 2006. Receiving or being considered for other awards does not preclude a student from applying for this award. Applications are due February 1, 2006. The 2006 award will be made at the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry meeting in May, 2006. This will be an annual award.

Applicants should submit four (4) copies of the following:

€A letter indicating interest in the award that includes the applicant's name, address, university, telephone number(s), e-mail address, department, date of dissertation proposal defense, and current status of the dissertation.

€A letter from the applicant's dissertation advisor/chair recommending the applicant's work for the award and verifying the date of the dissertation proposal defense.

€A research description of no more than five (5) double-spaced pages: approximately two pages of introduction and theory, two pages on the methodology, and one page on the significance of the work. Finalists may be asked to submit their full proposal or additional information at a later date.

€One chapter and a table of contents from the dissertation.

€Finalists may be asked to submit their full dissertation after the first round of adjudication, closer to the competition closing date.

Applications are now being accepted. Submissions should be sent to:

Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award Committee
The Center for Qualitative Inquiry
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Gregory Hall, Rm. 229 (mc-463)
810 South Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

For further information email dissertationaward@c4qi.org or visit http://www.c4qi.org/award.html

DEADLINE: February 1, 2006

Posted by prolurkr at 11:56 PM | TrackBack

CFP - SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW
SPECIAL ISSUE ON COMPUTERS AND CONTENT ANALYSIS

A special issue of Social Science Computer Review will highlight advances in computer-supported analysis of texts and images. Contributors are encouraged to submit original research that demonstrates innovative applications of computer-supported content analysis; review essays on tools, trends, and techniques in computer-supported content analysis; and articles that consider important theoretical and methodological issues relevant in computer-supported content analysis. Papers from a broad range of social science perspectives are encouraged. Papers may address qualitative or quantitative approaches. Papers may address texts or images of any sort, including media content, interview transcripts, and open-ended responses to survey questions. Submissions can be in the form of full papers (typically 20 to 35 manuscript pages in length) or in the form of shorter papers.

This special issue on Computers and Content Analysis will be edited by William Evans, Ph.D., Director of the Institute for Communication and Information Research at the University of Alabama.

Deadline for submissions is June 15, 2006 for publication in 2007.

KEY DATES

Submission of papers: June 15, 2006

Review feedback: August 15, 2006

Submission of final papers: October 1, 2006

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

Send an electronic copy of the paper, along with a cover letter, to William Evans (wevans@ua.edu).

Length: No more than 40 manuscript pages in length, including all references and figures.

Formatting: Electronic submissions only (Microsoft Word or PDF format). Manuscripts accepted for publication must adhere to APA style, although other style guides may be used for initial submissions. Each manuscript should include: title, author list with affiliations, a brief abstract, a list of keywords preceding the main text, and short author bios, references and endnotes following the main text. See the Social Science Computer Review web page listed below for complete details.

INFORMATION ABOUT SOCIAL SCIENCE COMPUTER REVIEW

The Social Science Computer Review (SSCORE) is an interdisciplinary journal covering both social science instructional and research applications of computing as well as social science research on societal impacts of information technology. Among topics within the scope of the journal are artificial intelligence, computational social science theory, computer-assisted survey research, computer-based qualitative analysis, computer simulation, economic modeling, geographic information systems, instructional multimedia, instrumentation and research tools, social impacts of computing and telecommunications, software evaluation, and Internet resources for social scientists.

SSCORE is a peer-reviewed publication of Sage Publications, Inc. Now in its 23rd year of publication, SSCORE carries articles and reports, extensive resource listings in its "News and Notes" section, software reviews, and book reviews. There are frequent symposia issues on social science disciplines, on new computer-intensive methodologies, and on the political and social impacts of computing.

A web site for SSCORE can be found at http://hcl.chass.ncsu.edu/sscore/sscore.htm. See also http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=198.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:25 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Blogging and Online Journalism: New Media, New Challenges, New Ethics

Blogging and Online Journalism: New Media, New Challenges, New Ethics

April 7 & 8, 2006

The Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics at Ohio University and the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism announce "Blogging and Online Journalism."

BOJ will bring together a small group of successful, highly motivated students with some of the leading figures in journalism and media ethics for an intimate, in-depth two-day exploration of one of the most interesting and dynamic areas in applied ethics today. After a daily keynote address on a topic of general interest, participants will break up into workgroups. These workshops will feature presentations by invited scholars and by student participants, with discussion and critique of the presentations.

Presentations and workshop summaries will be published on the Institute website.

Participation is limited to 25. Students interested in participating should send contact information and a brief paper on one of the workshop topics to ethics@ohio.edu by January 20, 2006. Participants will be selected on the basis of the paper they submit. Please visit the "STUDENT CONFERENCE" section of ohio.edu/ethics for submission requirements.

Travel grants (travel, room, and board) are available for a limited number of participants. Students interested in applying for travel support should indicate this in their application.

Keynote speakers:

Dan Gillmore (author of "We, the Media")

Clifford Christians (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain)

Workshop topics and leaders:

Friday, April 7

Martin Kuhn (U North Carolina): Blogging Ethics

Fernanda Viegas (MIT MediaLab): Privacy and Accountability in Blogging

Jan Boyles (U West Virginia): Rhetoric of Political Bloggers

Sandeep Junnarker (Columbia University): Blogging investigative reporting: The Videoblog

Saturday, April 8th

Mark Deuze (Indiana University): Typology of Online Journalism

Bob Benz (Scripps Company): Reality Constraints of Online Journalism

Bernhard Debatin (Ohio University): Online Journalism Ethics

Posted by prolurkr at 04:08 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Cyborgs Old and New

Call for papers for a panel at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Convention.

March 23-26, 2006 at Princeton University.

Cyborgs Old and New

Panel organizers: Stefani Engelstein (engelsteins@missouri.edu) and Carsten Strathausen (strathausenc@missouri.edu)

This panel will consider the concept of the cyborg not merely as the actual augmentation of the body with machinery, but rather as an acknowledgement that the organic is inherently mechanical. Today it is impossible to separate technology from biology, as new interventions in the body take the form of cloning and chimerical hybrids of human and animal genetic material. This development seems to signal a new victory over our natural limitations as we strive to become what Freud called a "prosthetic god," following the path toward a technological utopia already manifest in Robert Hooke's seventeenth century paean to the microscope. Every technology, however, functions through a tacit acceptance of our integration into nature, blending the human, the mechanical, and the animal. This constellation is not original to the present, but recurs at times that coincide with a crisis in our definition of the human. It is no accident that La Mettrie theorized the human as a machine at the same moment that Linnaeus created a classification system that made humans full members of the primate order in the animal kingdom.

We seek original papers that examine the current crisis of what it means to be human without losing sight of the past. Is the "cyborg" still a useful term or has it become so ubiquitous today as to have lost its "proper" (i.e. hybrid) meaning? Are terms like the "post-human" (K. Hayles) or the "symbiont" (G. Longo) any better?

Please submit 250-word abstracts online before November 30, 2005 at the following link: http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=4

The conference is organized primarily into seminars (or "streams"), which consist either of twelve papers, if they meet on all three days of the conference, or eight to nine papers, if they meet on two days. Papers should be 15-20 minutes long-no longer-to allow time for discussion.

For more information on the ACLA or the conference go to: http://www.acla.org/

Posted by prolurkr at 06:12 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Computers & Writing Online 2006: Making Knowledge on the Digital Frontier

Computers & Writing Online 2006: Making Knowledge on the Digital Frontier

February 6 to 28, 2006

Proposals Due: 30 November 2005

We are pleased to announce Computers & Writing Online 2006: Making Knowledge on the Digital Frontier-a conference for all educators. This conference occurs completely online and complements the face-to-face conference that will be held in May at Texas Tech University.

We invite proposals from individuals and teams addressing the interface between writing practice, writing pedagogy, and technology. Proposals can be submitted for synchronous, asynchronous, or poster presentations. Synchronous presentations and poster sessions will occur on Saturday, February 18th in the English MOO (encore Learning Environment) at Texas Tech University. The schedule allows one hour for synchronous presentations and 45 minutes for poster sessions. Posters will remain up the entire day, and poster presenters are encouraged to spend one or more poster sessions in the virtual room with their posters. Asynchronous presentations will occur over five-day periods from February 6th through 28th using the ComputersandWriting.org site, the information portal for the Computers & Writing community.

We encourage proposals on a wide range of topics that address the conference theme of "Making Knowledge on the Digital Frontier." These topics include but are not limited to:

* "New" technologies such as wikis and blogs in the writing classroom-technologies that are changing the way we deliver and administer courses in support of our students' learning

* Reconsideration of past propositions about how computer networks are best suited for learning and instructionWriting and learning communities online across distance and culture

* The sociology of digital communities

* The interface between Rhetoric and Composition theory and technology

* The technologies of Technical Communication: theory, practice, pedagogy

* Online portfolios-the state of the art

* Visual rhetoric and new media

Proposals are due 30 November 2005. Send 250-word abstracts by email (in the body, not as an attachment) to cwonline@lyris.ttu.edu. Please be sure to include the following information:

* Email subject line: CWonline2006 Proposal

* Name

* Institutional affiliation

* Title of proposed presentation

* Whether the proposal is for an asynchronous, synchronous, or poster session

* Phone number

* Email address

For more information on the conference and session formats, please see the conference website or contact Conference Coordinator, Lennie Irvin at lennie.irvin@ttu.edu. The conference hosts will provide support (a technology buddy) for those who may be unfamiliar with any of the online technologies used for the conference.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:29 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Intimacy and Exteriority

ACLA Annual Conference Seminar, Princeton University, March 23-26, 2006

Mon semblable, mon frère

Deadline for proposal submissions: Nov. 30, 2005

From Petrarch, who wrote familiar letters to his classical models, to Derrida, who could elide the boundary between his own voice and the voices of his texts to powerful effect, a disarming sense of intimacy between reader and text has been a consistent aspect of humanistic practise. Yet beside the extraordinary proximity achieved in humanistic reading there always seems to open a great distance, as though we are never so far away from our texts as when we are closest to them. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism Edward Said referred to this twinning of intimacy with exteriority under the headings of receptivity and resistance, but analogous formulations can be found in ethnography, ethics, political theory, and fiction.

We wish to explore how the simultaneity of intimacy and exteriority has been articulated in different times, places, and discursive modes. Readings, comparative or otherwise, of literary, theoretical, philosophical, or critical works are welcomed, as are broader original formulations on the theme. Papers that can enact the theme at the same time as they discuss it are especially welcome. Topics and authors might include the philosophy of friendship, Derrida/Nancy on touch, figurations of intimacy in fiction and poetry, the possession of language, intimacies in religious experience; but this is not, of course, an exclusive list.

Papers will be presented as a seminar at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association; proposals for this seminar, including title and a 250-word abstract, should be submitted at the ACLA's conference web site, selecting "Intimacy and Exteriority" as the desired panel.

Posted by prolurkr at 04:21 PM | TrackBack

CFP - American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting: The Human and its Others

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting: The Human and its Others
Princeton University, March 23-26, 2006

Seminar: "The Body in the Digital"

The digital is perhaps the defining "other" of the human body in the late 20th century. Papers and/or performances are invited that seek to investigate the informatic relationship between the animal and the machine, as Norbert Wiener put it in the subtitle of his Cybernetics. The relation of the carnal to the mathematical, or physical to digital, is a pressing contemporary concern for artists, theorists and writers. Therefore this question will be framed as broadly as possible, in historical terms, inviting scholars specializing in all periods and areas up to the present, from the Baroque, the 19th Century and the early 20th to to the present. This seminar will consider the relation of physicality and digitality, with a cast of
conceptual personae that include thinking machines, automata, robots, cyborgs, posthumans, and other hybrid monsters.

Topics may include (in no particular order):
Immanence
Transcendence (e.g., overcoming the body through technology, "downloading" the mind)
Spinoza
Descartes
Leibniz
Hobbes
Dualisms (of mind/body, software/hardware, human/machine, etc.)
Cybernetics
Media and the human body
Histories of computing
Thinking machines
Norbert Wiener and his contemporaries
Deleuze
Actor-Network Theory (Latour et al.)
Virtual/Real
Analogue/Digital
Philosophies of the interface
Digital practices
Performing the body online (e.g., blogging, chat, webcams)
The physicality of the Internet
Digital desire
Techno-fetishes
The faces of digital technology
Death and the digital

This seminar is organized in collaboration with the journal Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics.

Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length. Deadline for submissions is 30 November. Please submit abstracts of 250 words online at: http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/?page_id=4

Feel free to address any questions or suggestions to the seminar organizer, Gauti Sigthorsson (g.sigthorsson@gre.ac.uk). All abstracts must be submitted via the ACLA website.

For more information on the conference, its location and format, please see: http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/

Posted by prolurkr at 04:09 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Linguistic and Cultural Online Communication Issues in the Global Age (edited volume)

Linguistic and Cultural Online Communication Issues in the Global Age

Edited by Kirk St.Amant, Texas Tech University, USA

INTRODUCTION TO SUBJECT AREA
International online access has grown rapidly in recent years with the number of global Internet users growing by almost 2.8 million in July of 2004 alone. This increased global access, however, brings with it a variety of new conditions and concerns that could markedly affect international interactions in online environments. Differences in language, cultural communication expectations, laws, and software standards are but some of the factors individuals need to consider when using online media to interact with individuals from different countries and cultures. This collection will address these issues by exploring the various aspects that could affect communication and comprehension in international online interactions.

OBJECTIVE OF PROPOSED BOOK
The primary objective of this text is to provide readers with in-depth information on the various linguistic, cultural, technological, legal, and other factors that affect interactions in online exchanges. Through examining such topics, this collection would help readers make more effective decisions related to the uses and design of online media when interacting with individuals from other cultures. This primary objective would also accomplish two secondary, but equally important, objectives:

• The collection would provide readers with the foundational knowledge needed to communicate effectively with individuals from other countries and cultures via online media.

• The collection would provide readers with the knowledge needed to create effective online materials for users (clients, students, colleagues, etc.) from other countries and cultures.

AUDIENCE FOR THIS PROPOSED TEXT
The primary audience for this book would include seven groups that would use this text for a variety of reasons. These audiences/groups are:

• Executives, managers, and other business decision makers
• Marketers, service providers, and support personnel
• Researchers (both academic and corporate) studying cross-cultural discourse in online environments
• Educators who teach in online learning environments
• Educational administrators who manage international students participating in online programs
• Administrators of international non-profit agencies

RECOMMENDED TOPICS
Prospective subject areas and specific topics for this publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

The Growth of Global Online Access
• Historical developments affecting international Internet access and developments or trends currently affecting international online access
• The global digital divide and public and private projects used to expand international Internet use.

Language, Culture, and Online Communication
• Linguistic and other cultural communication factors affecting online exchanges
• Implications linguistic or cultural communication differences could have for future developments related to online communication
• English as a global language and how cultural groups use different kinds of online media

Technology, Compatibility, and International Online Discourse
• Technological factors that affect if, how, and when individuals from different nations use online media to locate or to exchange information
• Different kinds of software and hardware/computing technology used to interact online
• Effects telecommunications infrastructures of different regions have on online access in those areas

Law, Policy, and International Internet Use
• Legal standards or policy stances affecting how individuals in different nations use online media
• Different national privacy and copyright laws affecting the nature of international online interactions
• Policies of government monitoring that affect uses of online media in different nations
• Policies on infrastructure developments that affect online access in different regions

Markets, Economics, and International E-commerce
• Economic conditions affecting how individuals in different nations use online media
• Prospects of using online media to tap overseas markets
• Corporate plans for expanding online access into different regions (especially developing nations)
• E-marketing practices related to global audiences
• International outsourcing’s affects on online access in different regions
• Economic factors affecting the language and design choices used when interacting online

Globalization, Education, and Online Environments
• Educational factors affecting online access and use in different regions
• Effects of globalization on online education and enrollments in online programs
• Examinations of how different educational conditions and standards uses of online media
• Discussions of how online environments can improve education in different regions

Perspectives on the Future of Global Cyberspace
• Future development of international online access and discourse in global cyberspace
• Establishing global standards for online discourse (or online legal practices)
• Examining how technology developments might change the nature of international cyberspace
• Discussions of what increased global online access might mean for domestic online interactions

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
Prospective authors are invited to submit chapter proposals of 200-500 words on or before November 15, 2005. In their proposal, prospective authors should clearly explain:
• The purpose and the contents of their proposed chapter
• How their proposed chapter relates to the overall objectives of the book

Authors will be notified of the status of their proposal and sent chapter organization guidelines by December 15, 2005. Drafts of chapters will be due by March 15, 2006.

Please send inquiries or submit material electronically (Rich Text files) to the editor at kirk.st-amant@ttu.edu

The book is scheduled to be published by Idea Group Inc. publisher of the Idea Group Publishing, Information Science Publishing, IRM Press, CyberTech Publishing, and Idea Group Reference imprints, in Spring 2007.

Posted by prolurkr at 01:17 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Girls' Studies Interest Group

The newly-formed Girls' Studies Interest Group of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) seeks panelists for our proposed sessions on Girls' Studies.

We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations on research with girls. We welcome diverse theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives.

Please email your proposals to both hains@temple.edu and rebekahb@temple.edu by October 28, 2005. Please include the following information:

- Name
- Affiliation
- Contact information (telephone, email, mailing address)
- A brief biography or c.v.
- A short abstract (300-500 words)

The 2006 conference will take place in Oakland, California from June 15-18. Conference details are available at http://www.nwsaconference.org/ .

Posted by prolurkr at 06:58 AM | TrackBack

CFP - The Human in Posthuman Technology

American Contemporary Literature Association Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Other
Seminar Title: The Human in Posthuman Technology
Princeton, NJ, March 23-26, 2006
Seminar Organizer(s): Steven A. Benko, Meredith College
(benkos@meredith.edu)

Answers to questions of how technology impacts definitions of what it means to be human, what is other than human, what constitutes the good, natural and normal for human life and society, and how subjects can constitute, experience and communicate their own otherness through technology vary widely along the spectrum from humanism to posthumanism. At one end are bioconservative responses that suggest a shared and unchanging conception of human nature threatened by scientific and technological advances that alter or enhance human capabilities and functioning. At the other end are posthuman responses that use science and technology as an occasion for the kind of individuation that relativizes and resists humanism's essentializing ethnocentrism.

This seminar will explore literary, philosophical and religious depictions of science and technology in terms of how what is human, other than human, and the relationship between the two is defined. Possible topics include:  defining the posthuman through literature; the use of technology to define the human and its other in a specific author or genre; the possibility of developing a critical theory of technology or an ethics of technology vis-à-vis the human, its other, and obligations to preserve what it means to be human or an obligation to the other; the use of religious rituals, tropes or imagery to restrain, encourage, and determine the morality of scientific and technological development and the depiction of what it means to be human/posthuman.

The list of accepted seminars for the 2006 Annual Meeting has been posted (go to the paper proposal form; go to the Seminars) and individual paper proposals are now being accepted.

The conference is organized primarily into seminars (or "streams"), which consist either of twelve papers, if they meet on all three days of the conference, or eight to nine papers, if they meet on two days. Papers should be 15-20 minutes long-no longer-to allow time for discussion. To propose a paper, first consult the list of accepted seminar proposals. If you find a topic there that fits your paper, select that seminar when you fill out the paper proposal submission form. If you do not find a seminar topic that fits your paper, you may propose your paper for the general pool, out of which additional seminars are likely to be formed. Paper proposals are 250 words, max. Proposals are due no later than November 30th. Paper proposals can be submitted through the ACLA 2006 website (http://webscript.princeton.edu/~acla06/site/). If you have any questions about this particular seminar, contact the seminar organizer at benkos@meredith.edu.

Posted by prolurkr at 06:49 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Journal of e-Media Studies

The Journal of e-Media Studies announces that we are accepting submissions for publication.

The deadline for our inaugural issue is November 15, 2005. Special topic sections of the journal, to include more than one related essay, may be proposed. We intend our inaugural issue to premiere in Spring, 2006.

We are committed to the rapid turnaround of subsequent journal submissions in as practical a means as possible.

Manuscripts can be e-mailed to the editors at e-Media@Dartmouth.edu, or a CD/DVD version may be mailed to:

Journal of e-Media Studies
Dept. of Film and Television Studies
6194 Wilson Hall
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
USA

JOE-MS is a blind peer-reviewed, on-line journal dedicated to the scholarly study of the history and theory of electronic media, especially Television and New Media.  It is an inter-disciplinary journal, and we welcome submissions across the fields and methodologies that study media and media history.

Our goal is to promote the academic study of electronic media, especially in light of the rise of digital media and the changes in formal and expressive capacities resulting from new configurations of electronic media
forms.  We solicit the best new scholarly work on current and historical e-media issues and topics, including work on inter-medial relations to traditionally non-electronic media (such as cinema, theater, and print media).

We welcome essays in traditional textual formats.  We strongly encourage submissions that utilize and develop the features that an on-line journal can afford, in order to realize new analytical and pedagogical practices and strategies.

Please see our website [http://journals.dartmouth.edu/joems/] for more details about our Submissions Guidelines, list of Editorial Board members, and Mission Statement.

Posted by prolurkr at 09:49 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Communication Yearbook 31

Communication Yearbook 31 will feature state-of-the-discipline literature reviews of communication research. In particular, the volume will highlight reviews of research exploring communication concepts that span traditional “division” divides, issues of central importance to the accomplishment of communication in a variety of contexts and for diverse communicators throughout the world. The volume will also feature literature reviews that examine intersections of concepts and/or theories of central importance to the discipline of communication--reviews that detail how bodies of research can and should inform and enhance other scholarly areas as well as possible applications beyond the academy.

Potential contributors may submit a narrative analysis or a meta-analysis; however, they should carefully integrate comprehensive and thoughtful synthesis and critique of core research findings as well as reflections on future directions for this area of scholarship in terms of theory and application. Potential contributors may certainly review relevant literature published in any language, but submissions must be written in English. Submissions must adhere to APA, 5th edition.

Potential contributors must submit extended abstracts (e.g., 10-15 pages) or complete manuscripts (maximum of 70 pages) by November 15, 2005; however, early submissions are highly encouraged. If authors opt to submit an extended abstract, they should be sure to include (a) a compelling rationale for the value of the particular literature review for a global community of diverse communication scholars and practitioners, (b) a persuasive description of (and argument for) the bodies of scholarship that will be reviewed, and (c) a specific outline for the more developed chapter. Notably, the extended abstract does not need to reference all of the particular articles and/or books that may be reviewed, but it should provide clear explanation of how the literature review will be conducted and how relevant bodies of work will be selected.

Please submit documents electronically via Word attachment to Dr. Christina S. Beck, Editor, Communication Yearbook 31, at BECK@ohio.edu. All documents must be prepared in advance for blind review, with all identifying aspects removed. Authors must mask references to their own works within the text. The title page must be submitted as a separate word document, and it should include all contact information (i.e., mailing address, e-mail address, telephone number, and fax number) for all authors as well as a list of keywords for the submission.

For more information about Communication Yearbook 31 or this call for submissions, please contact Dr. Beck at (740) 593-9167 or via e-mail at BECK@ohio.edu. Although electronic submissions are required, other correspondence may be sent, if desired, to: Dr. Christina S. Beck, Editor, Communication Yearbook 31, Ohio University, School of Communication Studies, 210 Lasher Hall, Athens, OH 45701.

Posted by prolurkr at 12:34 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology

William A. Kern Conference Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology April 20-23, 2006 Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, New York

The 3rd bi-annual conference on Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology will be held in Rochester NY, April 20-23, 2006. This year's plenary sessions focus on resources for research and future directions for visual communication and rhetoric. Papers covering wider related topics are welcome. This conference seeks especially to illuminate connections between theory and practice of visual communication with theory and criticism of visual rhetoric, and both with the technologies used to create, reproduce, circulate and interact with visual messages. Practitioners of various modes of visual communication are especially welcome to submit presentations centered on their work and practice.

As in the past, the conference will hold sessions at the George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film, the Visual Studies Workshop, and various venues in Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology.

Individual proposals for papers, panels and seminars will be considered. Please submit 3 copies of individual papers; abstracts of panel proposals including a description of the panel, an abstract of each presentation and contact information for all participants; and 1 page proposals for special seminars by January 15, 2006 to Diane S. Hope, Kern Professor in Communication, College of Liberal Arts, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY. 14623. Direct inquires to Diane Hope ( dshgpt@rit.edu) or 585-475-6053. Or fax: 585-475-7732.

Contact: Diane S. Hope ( dshgpt@rit.edu) website under construction

Posted by prolurkr at 11:43 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Console-ing Passions, the international conference on television, video, audio, and new media

Console-ing Passions, the international conference on television, video, audio, and new media, invites submissions for the 2006 conference to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

Dates:          May 25-27th, 2006
Conference Location:    University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Founded in 1989 by a group of feminist media scholars and artists, Console-ing Passions works to create collegial spaces for new work and scholarship on culture and identity in television and related media, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality.

Since 1992, Console-ing Passions conferences have featured new research on feminist perspectives, including race and ethnicity, post-colonialism, queer studies, globalization, national identity, fusion genres, the social and cultural insertion of new  media, the historical development of media, and an ongoing feminist concern with gender dynamics in the production and consumption of electronic media (excluding cinema).

Console-ing Passions¹ emphasis on electronic media reflects its mission to provide an alternative scholarly space to those centered on film; papers or projects that include film as part of a larger perspective are welcome but non-film media are the primary focus.

Proposal Submissions:

Individual Papers: Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words along with a short bio.

Panels: Please submit a rationale for the panel (3-4 papers) of no more than 150 words, as well as abstracts of 500 words for each paper and a short bio and contact information for each contributor.

Workshops: Please submit a rationale for the workshop (a series of short, informal presentations on a related topic, meant to encourage discussion), along with individual abstracts of no more than 200 words and a short bio and contact information for each participant.

Screenings of video, audio, or new media work: Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short bio of the producer/director.

All submissions must include an email message with the following information:
name, affiliation, email address, and telephone number for the author, panel or workshop organizer, or producer/director for screenings.  Email message should also specify the audio/visual materials needed for the presentation.  Please be as specific about a/v needs as possible.

All proposals must be saved as PDF files and attached to the email message.  All identifying information should be omitted from the PDF files for the purpose of blind review.  All must have a title.  Email message and PDF files should be labelled as follows:  your last name and the type of proposal (i.e. Smithpaper
or Smithpanel or Smithworkshop or Smithscreening).

Please submit all proposals to cptv@uwm.edu.

Deadline for receipt of proposals is December 15, 2005.

Please direct all questions about the conference and the submission process to cptv@uwm.edu.

See the Console-ing Passions website: http://www.cp.commarts.wisc.edu for more information about Console-ing Passions and the 2006 conference.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:20 AM | TrackBack

CFP - The Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

The Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry
(http://www.QI2006.org)
 
"Ethics, Politics and Human Subject Research In the New Millennium²
 
The Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from May 3-6, 2006.
 
The theme of the Second International Congress, "Ethics, Politics and Human Subject Research" builds on and extends the theme of the First International Congress which focused on ³Qualitative Inquiry in a Time of Global
Uncertainty.² The 2006 Congress will explore experiences with and criticisms of Institutional Review Boards. It will question the over-reliance of audit cultures on evidence-based, neo-experimental models of inquiry. The 2006
Congress will investigate new ways of decolonizing traditional methodologies. It will take up performative, feminist, indigenous, democratic and participatory forms of critical inquiry. The 2006 Congress
will examine how these new forms of inquiry can advance the goals of social justice and progressive politics in this new century.
 
Session Themes will include, but not be confined to these topics:
alternative IRB models, interpretive inquiry and IRBs, disciplines and their ethical codes, active interviews, auto- and performance ethnography, arts-based inquiry, coloring and engendering epistemology, colonial and
post-colonial epistemologies, critical performance narratives, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, cultural studies and critical pedagogy, democratic methodologies, discourse, ethnodrama, story, poetry, epistemology, oral history, queer, feminist and gender studies, focus groups, funding qualitative research, globablization, health care, grounded theory and social justice, human rights, indigenous studies, models of evidence, mixed-methodologies, participatory action research, policy studies, portraiture, post-human subjects, qualitative evaluation inquiry, qualitative health research, technology, mobility, memory, representation, working with multicultural populations.
 
Half-day (morning and afternoon) pre-conference workshops (May 4) will precede the three-day Congress (May 4-6), which will consist of keynote, plenary, spotlight, featured, and regular sessions. There will also be opening and closing receptions and banquets, and a town hall meeting for the newly formed International Association of Qualitative Inquiry.
 
We invite your submission of paper and session proposals. Session and paper submissions will be accepted online only from October 1 until December 1, 2005. Conference and workshop registration will begin December 1, 2005.To learn more about the Second International Congress and submit your paper or panel, please visit our website <www.QI2006.org>.

Posted by prolurkr at 07:00 AM | TrackBack

CFP: The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature

CFP: The Theory and Practice of Life Writing:  Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature (Turkey) (2/20/06; 4/19/06-4/21/06)
 
We are inviting 20-minute papers for a symposium to be held by Halic University in Istanbul, Turkey, 19-21
April 2006 on the subject of the modern self in and as writing.

What does it mean to transform the self – or oneself – into writing in a modern or postmodern world? This symposium will focus on the theory and practice of auto/biographical writing from the end of the 19th century until today, and on its many genres and sub-genres; from memoirs to family histories to travelogues. Along the way, some of the following questions may be addressed: How do auto/biographies reflect cultural differences? What are the strategies employed by authors to turn their lives into narrative? Is there an ethics of auto/biography? Is all writing in some sense autobiographical?
 
Additional sub-genres and topics may include:
-Auto/biography and gender studies
-Ethnic auto/biography
-Auto/biographical novel/poetry/drama
-Disability/disease auto/biography
-The (in)significance of the body in auto/biographies
-Concepts of nationhood and history in auto/biography, memoirs and travelogues
-Creation of cultural and/or collective memory through life writing
-Film as auto/biography
-Use of photograph and other media in auto/biography
-Exile and diaspora
-Childhood
-Postcolonial auto/biography
-Auto/biography and psychoanalytic theory

Selected contributors will be invited to expand their papers into essays to be published in a collection.

More information / abstract submission (one-page abstract of your paper and a brief curriculum vitae by
20 February 2006):  halic2006_at_yahoo.com

Posted by prolurkr at 05:27 PM | TrackBack

Announcing "Teen Works 2005: Young People and the Internet"

WISE KIDS and IT Wales are co-organising a one day conference entitled, "Teen Works 2005: Young People and the Internet", on the 15th of November 2005. The conference will be held at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, and is one of the events held as part of ict forum wales 2005.

The conference aims to explore young people's awareness and use of the Internet and mobile phones, and look at current and upcoming trends in this area. It also aims to look at current research and guidelines in this area, and provide relevant examples and strategies that young people and adults can use to take advantage of the Internet and mobile phone technologies, whilst ensuring their personal safety. Through the specialist seminars in the afternoon, topics like child protection issues and moderating online communities will also be covered.

The speakers for the event will include Rhian Davies, Assistant Children's Commissioner for Wales, Josh Dhaliwal, Director of Mobile Youth, Angus Cormie, Director of The Digital Business, Bill Westhead from the Cyberspace Research Unit, University of Central Lancashire and Tamara Littleton, CEO of eModeration. Young people will also be invited to attend and participate in the event.

For more details and registration, please visit:
http://www.wisekids.org.uk/conferenceregistration.htm
Also, please feel free to circulate this notice to any of your colleagues who may be interested to attend.

Sangeet Bhullar
Executive Director
WISE KIDS
email: sangeet@wisekids.org.uk
http://www.wisekids.org.uk

Posted by prolurkr at 07:46 AM | TrackBack

CFP - E-Learning Journal

Special Edition of E-Learning Journal
Guest Editor:
Angela Thomas
University of Sydney
a.thomas@edfac.usyd.edu.au

Theme of the Issue:  Digital Inter-Faces

Description:

The focus of this special edition of E-Learning is ‘Digital Inter-Faces’. The articles in the edition will examine the issue of identity in and around digital contexts.  As our lives become increasingly more technologically inclusive, we face new opportunities to e-xplore, e-xamine, e-xtend, e-xperiment, and e-volve.  Technology is changing the ways we think about the world and the ways we position ourselves in the world.  Our involvement in and around digital contexts has opened up a place for living within a multiplicity of identities and through this, we can act out our fantasies, become the Other of our desire, and just as importantly, in the words of Eowyn, a 15 year old girl, “It's not becoming your own hero that's the point-- it's allowing what's inside of you to show
through”.

And yet online our selves can be conveniently edited, we can be kinder and funnier and more intelligent.  In the same series of posts about her online life, Eowyn told me, “The person I show to others online is outgoing, different, and not afraid to be herself”, and Shadow, a 14 year old boy, revealed, “I am sort of a persona, me but minus the things I don’t like about myself”.  Other children revealed to me that rather than edited selves, they become fused selves with their online role-playing characters.  The faces shown to others online may be masks of other personae or characters, yet underneath are intimately fused with the self.

What are the consequences and implications of these new faces?  The faces of our cyborg self, our edited self, our hybrid self, our fused and blended self into another character, and the Other of our desire.  What can we actually learn in this masquerading of fragmentedness that has become a hallmark of post-modern identity?  In this issue of E-Learning, our contributors discuss aspects of these issues, drawing from a range of theoretical, sociological and political perspectives.  Thoughts about gender, race, youth, politics, power, trust, and authenticity are critically discussed with respect to the many faces and inter-faces of the digital world.

Submission Deadline: January 18th, 2006
Submit to: Angela Thomas, a.thomas@edfac.usyd.edu.au

Information about the journal and papers: http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/?.

Posted by prolurkr at 11:49 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Academic Session: "A Tremendous Shattering of Tradition": Reconsidering Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'

CFP: Academic Session: "A Tremendous Shattering of Tradition":  Reconsidering Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'
(AAH Annual Conference, University of Leeds, UK, 4/6/2006 - 4/8/2006)

Session convenors: Patricia Allmer, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, Cavendish North Building, Cavendish Street, Manchester, M15 6BG, sears@allmer.fsnet.co.uk

John Sears, Manchester Metropolitan University (Cheshire),
Interdisciplinary Studies, Crewe Green Road, Crewe, Cheshire, CW1 5DU,
J.Sears@mmu.ac.uk

Session Abstract:

This session will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the publication of Walter Benjamin's seminal essay 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit', translated into English by Harry Zohn in 1968 (year of revolutionary discontent) as 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'.

In 1936 the essay offered a challenge not only to Fascist appropriations of art, but also to conventional Marxist aesthetics as well as to phenomenological theorisations of art - witness its problematic reception by Adorno and others, its expressed discontent with what it sees as depoliticised modes of aesthetic engagement, and its analysis of "a world without aura" (Rodolphe GaschE9). These challenges are repeated in different ways in the essay's influence on the turbulent intellectual scene of the late 1960s. It has contributed significantly to the development of both Marxist and postmodernist theorisations of culture, as well as to the ongoing art-historical reassessment of the art work and its roles in contemporary media-dominated societies. In short, Benjamin's essay constitutes a major, if continually contested, contribution to debates about modernism and postmodernism that retain their currency in the age of digital reproduction, "a period when politics as spectacle has become a commonplace in our televisual world", as Susan Buck-Morss argues.

The essay's perennial appeal to discontented Marxist and other modes of reading modern and postmodern art may constitute one line of enquiry. Papers are also sought that will explore the essay's continuing significance for contemporary theories, practices and histories of art. The essay has exerted a profound influence on the work of key theorists (eg October) and practitioners (Warhol, Burgin, Sherman); papers may wish to explore or assess aspects or examples of this influence. Other topics might include Benjamin's notions of the aura of the art work, of originality, of reproduction; changes in the significance for art history of mechanical and other forms of reproduction; the implications and consequences of accommodating photography and film (Benjamin's exemplary modern media) within the configurations of art historical practice, and the essay's contribution to current debates about inter- and trans-disciplinarity (the 'contents' of the discipline of art history); the essay-form itself as exemplifying politicised, interventionist aesthetic practices of modernist and postmodernist malcontents; the essay itself considered as a work of art, enacting its own arguments in fragmentary, inconsistent forms; and considerations of the various publication contexts and initial critical receptions of and
responses to Benjamin's essay.

Papers are invited that address these and other topics in relation to reconsiderations of Benjamin's essay.

Details for Submission of Proposals:

Papers must not exceed 30 minutes. Please email a 200 word abstract to the session convenors before the 11th November 2005. Include the title of your paper, your full name and contact details and institutional affiliation (if applicable).

Please note that the call for papers for all the conference sessions has been published in the June edition of the AAH Bulletin and at the AAH website: www.aah.org.uk

Posted by prolurkr at 08:40 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Computing and Philosophy

COMPUTING AND PHILOSOPHY
IV European Meeting
http://www.eu-cap.org/
Norwegian University for Science and Technology
Dragvoll Campus, Trondheim, Norway, June 22-24, 2006

Conference Co-Chairs:
    Charles Ess (Drury University / NTNU): <cmess@drury.edu>
    May Thorseth (NTNU): <may.thorseth@hf.ntnu.no>

(E-CAP is the European conference on Computing and Philosophy, the European affiliate of the International Association for Computers and Philosophy (IACAP) for further information.)
 
IMPORTANT DATES
January 27, 2006                Submission of extended abstracts
March 1, 2006                       Notification of acceptance
May 5, 2006                         Early registration deadline
June 22-24, 2006                Conference
 
GENERAL INFORMATION
From Thursday 22 to Saturday 24 June 2006 the Fourth International European Conference on COMPUTING AND PHILOSOPHY will be held on the Dragvoll Campus of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
 
PROGRAM
Continuing the foci of the E-CAP conferences (beginning in Glasgow, 2002), ECAP'06 will deal with all aspects of the "computational turn" that has emerged over the past several decades, and continues to expand and develop as a result of the multiple interactions between philosophy and computing.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
   Dr. Raymond Turner, Department of Computer Science
                University of Essex, UK
   Dr. Vincent Hendricks, Department of Philosophy and Science Studies
               Roskilde University, Denmark

RELEVANT RESEARCH AREAS
We invite papers that address all topics related to computing and philosophy, including cross- and interdisciplinary work that explores the computational turn in new ways. Hence, the following is intended to be suggestive, but not exclusive:
 
- Philosophy of Computer Science - co-chairs, Amnon H. Eden, Raymond Turner (Essex) (see <http://pcs.essex.ac.uk/ecap06/cfp.html>)
- Ontology (Distributed Processing, Emergent Properties, Formal Ontology, Network Structures, etc) - chair, Luciano Floridi (Oxford)
- Computational Linguistics- chair, Staffan Larsson (Gothenburg University)
- Global Information Infrastructures - chair, Johnny Søraker (NTNU)
- Philosophy of Information and Information Technology
- Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Problem of Consciousness
- Computer-based Learning and Teaching Strategies and Resources & The Impact of Distance Learning on the Teaching of Philosophy and Computing
- IT and Gender Research, Feminist Technoscience Studies
- Information and Computing Ethics
- Biological Information, Artificial Life, Biocomputation
- New Models of Logic Software
- "Intersections" - e.g., work at the crossroads of logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and ICT/Computing, such as Philosophy of AI
 
SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Authors should submit an electronic version of an extended abstract (total word count approximately 1000 words). The file should also contain a 300 word abstract that will be used for the conference web site/booklet. Final papers must not exceed a total word count of 3500 words and an abstract of not more than 500 words. The submissions should be made electronically, either as PDF, rtf ,or Word format.
 
To submit papers visit <http://www.eu-cap.org/submit>
The extended abstract submission deadline is Friday 27th January 2006.
 
WORK IN PROGRESS (WiP) SESSION
A special Work in Progress (WiP) session will be organized. This session is mainly intended for presentation of on-going and recent work. Accepted papers will not be included in the conference proceedings; instead they will be published through the www. Submission should be sent in the same format as extended abstracts. Please indicate on your submission: WiP.

For information about paper submission and the program that is not available on the conference web site (<http://www.eu-cap.org/>), please contact the Conference Co-Chairs.
 
REGISTRATION
 
Registration will take place through the conference website,
<http://www.eu-cap.org/>
 
ACCOMMODATION
To book accommodation, please visit the conference web site,
<http://www.eu-cap.org/>/

VENUE
The NTNU campus at Dragvoll offers excellent conference facilities as well a beautiful physical setting as it overlooks Trondheim and the Trondheim fjord. The city of Trondheim (Norway's ancient capital and home to the
Nidaros Cathedral, the largest Gothic cathedral north of the Rhine) is easily accessible by air and rail, and is itself more than worth the visit.  (Beyond city-related information provided on the conference website, start
with <http://www.trondheim.com/>)

Posted by prolurkr at 09:43 AM | TrackBack

Information Society Project Fellowship Program

Information Society Project
Yale Law School
ISP Fellowship Announcement

The fellowship is designed for recent law graduates or Ph.Ds who are interested in careers in teaching and public service in any of the following areas: Internet and telecommunications law, first amendment law, media studies, intellectual property law, access to knowledge, cybercrime, cultural evolution, bioethics and biotechnology, and law and technology generally.  This year we have a particular interest in hiring fellows interested in computer security and privacy issues as well as development and the information society.

Fellows receive a salary of approximately $37,000 plus Yale benefits. Fellows are expected to work on an independent scholarly project as well as help with administrative and scholarly work for the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. More information on the ISP is available at: http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/

The formal application materials including the following:

(1) A brief (one to five page) statement of the applicant's proposed scholarly research;
(2) A copy of the applicant's resume;
(3) A law school (or graduate school) transcript;
(4) At least one sample of recent scholarly writing;
(5) Two letters of recommendation.

Applications can be sent all year round as fellows are accepted on a rolling basis. Applications for the 2006-7 ISP fellowship must postmarked no later than Feb. 1, 2006.

The application materials should be sent (in hard copy) to:

Information Society Project Fellowship Program
c/o Deborah Sestito, Room 333
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven CT 06520-8215

Posted by prolurkr at 02:43 AM | TrackBack

CFP - International Journal of Information Technology and Management (IJITM)

Organisational Blogs: Opportunities and Challenges

Guest Editors: Professor Sang M. Lee and Assistant Professor Silvana Trimi, University of Nebraska, USA

Weblogs (“blogs” for short) are frequently-updated websites consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, and information, typically run by a single person and usually hyperlinked to other sites. People put on their blogs a set of thoughts and series of links they find useful and interesting. Blogs are usually for two-way communication: offer information to others and also invite the readers for feedback.

The focus of this Special Issue will be on the uses of blogs in organisations. The primary aim will be investigating how blog applications can affect organisational communication, employee engagement, collaboration, knowledge management, and the ultimate outcome from the employee’s and organisation’s perspectives. For organisational blogs to be successful and even exist, it is necessary that employees are motivated and willing to use those blogs. Also, the organisation must create an environment which is conductive for effective blogging and thus securing benefits from its use. However, there also exist various challenges for organisational blogs. The most obvious would be how organisational blogs can result in the risk of damaging the reputation of the organisation, its products, or corporate policies. Also, blogs can expose sensitive information of the organisation to outsiders. The issue is to find a good balance between encouraging free speech while restricting harmful behaviour.

   Subject Coverage

Suitable topics for the Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• Strategies for effective organisational blogs
• Technical support for organisational blogs
• Human resource management issues in organisational blogs
• Knowledge management and organisational blogs
• Critical success factors of organisational blogs
• Privacy, security and confidentiality in organisational blogs
• Interorganisational collaboration and blogs
• Case studies of successful organisational blogs
• Innovative use of organisational blogs
• Cross-cultural study of organisational blogs

   Notes for Intending Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Papers Submission section under Author Guidelines

To submit a paper, please go to Submission of Papers

This is our preferred route for submitting papers; please use it if at all possible. However, if you experience any problems submitting papers in this way, an alternative route is suggested below

   Important Dates

Submission of papers: 3 March, 2006

Initial reviews: 5 May, 2006

Final paper selection: 4 August, 2006

   Editors and Notes

As an alternative to using the Submission of Papers site, you may send one copy in the form of an MS Word file attached to an e-mail (details in Author Guidelines) to one of the following:

Dr. Sang M. Lee
University Eminent Scholar and Chair
Department of Management
University of Nebraska
Lincoln NE 68588-0491
USA
Tel: (402) 472-3915
Fax: (402) 472-5855
E-mail: slee1@unl.edu

Dr. Silvana Trimi
Assistant Professor of MIS
Department of Management
University of Nebraska
Lincoln NE 68588-0491
USA
Tel: (402) 472-4459
Fax: (402) 472-5855
E-mail: strimi@unlserve.unl.edu

with an email copy only to:

Editor-in-Chief
IEL Editorial Office
PO Box 735
Olney, Bucks MK46 5WB
UK
Fax: +44 1234-240515
E-mail: ijitm@inderscience.com

Please include in your submission the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the name of the Guest Editor

Posted by prolurkr at 10:06 PM | TrackBack

CFP - Blogging, Web Design, Podcasting, or Video Logging

Computer Culture Area
2006 SWTexas Popular Culture Assoc./American Culture Assoc.
http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/

Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 8-11, 2006

We are seeking individual paper proposals as well as panel proposals (panels of three or four presenters) in various areas of computer media.  Panels are open to professionals, graduate students, and performers and designers. Proposals may be for histories and analyses from any number of perspectives. We are also interested in proposals from active bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, and Web page designers.

Papers on BLOGGING may focus on the controversy surrounding news coverage, commentary, and analysis. Papers may also study blogs and blogging culture in other realms, from the personal to the political, pedagogical, and commercial.

WEB DESIGNERS may submit sample pages (by link, for instance). In their abstracts, designers should describe the purpose and history of their work, or should outline a critical concern and propose a line of discussion of special interest to Web page designers or Web users. We will also consider papers that analyze or compare Web sites.

If you are an active PODCASTER or VIDEO LOGGER, you may submit the text of a sample podcast or vlog and describe the purpose and history of your endeavor. Include Web site addresses in your abstract. Podcasters who wish to participate in panels must be able to present a five-minute CD recording of their work.

For Panel Proposals:

Feel free to query first. Panel proposals should include all of the information demanded for individual paper proposals, including information about the panel chair, as well as a 100-word statement of the panel's rationale and of any noteworthy organizational features.

For Paper Proposals:
 
Please submit (preferably in the body of an email) a 200-word abstract by November 15, 2005. Include all contact information: address, phone number(s), fax number, and email address. Also include a biographical
note in which you outline your career and/or define your connection to the topic. However, you do not need to prove expertise in the area of your proposed presentation. Beginners, dabblers, and enthusiasts are all
welcome. This is a new and ever-changing field, and we are open to new people, approaches, and topics.

Send proposals to:

Professor Joseph Chaney
jchaney@iusb.edu
Department of English
Indiana University South Bend
South Bend IN 46634-7111
(574) 520-4870
fax: (574) 520-4538

Posted by prolurkr at 12:30 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Online Publishing

Online Publishing
Computer Culture Area
2006 SWTexas Popular Culture Assoc./American Culture Assoc.
http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/
Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 8-11, 2006

We are seeking individual paper proposals as well as panel proposals (panels of three or four presenters) on aspects of online publishing. We would welcome proposals by scholars (including graduate students), publishers, editors, writers, and artists.

Possible topics include:

**The future and challenges of the online magazine
**Literature online
**Art online
**Scholarship online
**New trends in online book publishing and/or sales
**Libraries, Google, and copyright law
**The history of online publishing
**The online readership

For Panel Proposals:

Feel free to query first. Panel proposals should include all of the information demanded for individual paper proposals, including information about the panel chair, as well as a 100-word statement of the panel's rationale and of any noteworthy organizational features.  We'll also consider round table discussions involving editors and
publishers.

For Paper Proposals:
 
Please submit a 200-word abstract by November 15, 2005 (preferably in the body of an email). Include all contact information: address, phone number(s), fax number, and email address. Also include a biographical note in which you outline your career and/or define your connection to the topic. However, you do not need to prove any special expertise in the area of your proposed presentation. Beginners, dabblers, and enthusiasts are welcome. We are open to new people, approaches, and topics.

Send proposals to:

Professor Joseph Chaney
jchaney@iusb.edu
Department of English
Indiana University South Bend
South Bend IN 46634-7111
(574) 520-4870
fax: (574) 520-4538

Posted by prolurkr at 12:15 AM | TrackBack

CFP - Theatrical Milestones: Past Legacies, Present Possibilities, Future Strategies

The Performance Studies Focus Group (PSFG) of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) invites proposals for panels, seminars, roundtable discussions, performances, workshops, and other innovative session formats for the annual ATHE meeting, which will be held at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago from August 3-6, 2006.
 
This conference marks the twentieth anniversary of ATHE, and will be based around the theme "Theatrical Milestones: Past Legacies, Present Possibilities, Future Strategies." We encourage submissions that directly relate to this particular theme, as well as submissions that engage with this specific theme to expand and interrogate a wide range of projects. We encourage submissions that explore performance and creativity in a variety of contexts, including, but not limited to: political performance, performing theatre history, cultural translation, performance ethnography, ritual performance, popular entertainment, pedagogy, and performance theory.  Sessions that directly address the borders and relationship between Performance Studies and other aspects of Theatre Studies are welcome.  

In light of ATHE's anniversary, we encourage interdisciplinary submissions and submissions with strong historical components.  We are interested in innovative scholarship and performances that engage the developments in the field from the last two decades. Presenters are also encouraged to engage with the communities and contexts of Chicago and its surrounding areas. We are particularly interested in proposals for events that are performative and dynamic, and that engage these issues through inventive and interactive formats.  The Performance Studies Focus Group welcomes diverse presenters, and hopes to build bridges between theatre and ritual practitioners, performance artists, junior and senior scholars, and graduate students.

ATHE currently uses an electronic submission format.  The information and the form are located on the ATHE website, at http://www.athe.org/conf/index.html.  To submit a panel proposal, click on the link titled, "Session Proposal Forms are available online."  The main page also has links to session format descriptions and further proposal information.  The deadline for all submissions is November 1, 2005. Please note that you must request audiovisual equipment by May 1, 2006 to avoid late fees.

While individual papers will receive serious consideration, submissions that pull together a strong panel of presenters (depending on the format) are encouraged.  With individual paper proposals, the Focus Group Conference Planner will curate panels, attempting to match up related papers.  In order to facilitate this process, these must be received directly by the focus group conference planner, at gwendolyn.alker@nyu.edu, by October 20.  Individual paper proposals should include title, contact information, and an abstract of no more than 500 words. With paper proposals and any other questions, please contact:

 
Gwendolyn Alker, Ph.D.
PSFG Conference Planner
Associate Teacher of Theatre Studies
Department of Drama/Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, 3rd Floor
New York University
New York, NY 10003

Posted by prolurkr at 12:03 AM | TrackBack

CFP - THE PRAGMATICS OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

THE PRAGMATICS OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION

Editors:
Susan Herring (Indiana University, USA)
Dieter Stein (Heinrich Heine University, Germany)
Tuija Virtanen (Abo Akademi University, Finland)

Although many aspects of computer-mediated communication (CMC) have already been addressed by scholars from a number of disciplines, the pragmatic dimensions of CMC have yet to be fully accounted for. By "pragmatic" we intend a range of phenomena from the narrower sense of presupposition and speech act conditions, to sociopragmatic aspects such as politeness and genre, all of which are concerned in some way
with language use and (social) meaning. Pragmatic effects are found in CMC modes that include instant messaging, SMS, weblogs, email, web forums, and experimental and graphical virtual worlds. They are produced by adults and adolescents (and sometimes children) at an increasing rate in a rapidly growing number of languages around the world.

We invite submissions for an edited book on the Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication, to be published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. Suggested topics include:

- Gricean maxims and implicatures
- Presuppositions and indirectness
- The use of greetings, openings and closings
- Speech acts and performativity
- Naming and referring conventions
- Cohesion and coherence
- Applications of politeness theory to CMC
- Analysis of new genres or genre-related features
- Culture-specific effects
- etc.

Scholars working within diverse theoretical paradigms are encouraged to submit current research that addresses computer-mediated communication from pragmatic perspectives. The overarching goal of the book is to forge ties with existing pragmatic theory as regards language use phenomena in CMC, as well as to advance theoretical understanding of pragmatics through integrating technological mediation as an explanatory variable for language use.

Submission Guidelines:

Potential contributors should email a 500-700 word proposal OR a complete manuscript draft if one is available (no partial drafts, please), including a title, and describing the topic, CMC data, analytical methods, and (preliminary) findings or observations, to all three editors by November 1, 2005. Complete, polished versions of accepted proposals or drafts (approximately 7000-10000 words) will be due March 30, 2006. Publication of the book is anticipated by late 2007.

Submitters are kindly asked to follow the style in the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (John Benjamins). In addition to referencing the pragmatics literature, potential contributors should make efforts to cite existing literature on CMC and language.

Please direct inquiries and preliminary proposal ideas to the editors:
Susan Herring (herring@indiana.edu), Dieter Stein
(stein@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de), or Tuija Virtanen (tuvirtan@abo.fi).