Here's some more detailed workshop info. All deadlines will be posted and updated in the sidebar on the right.
WORKSHOP SUMMARY
Online communities provide researchers with social network data of unprecedented scope and quality. This data makes it possible for researchers to answer core questions of social behavior (e.g. How do norms emerge? What makes some groups succeed and thrive while others wither?), but answers to these questions are only available if the trails of online interactions are collected, organized, and arranged for analysis. This involves several stages of processing: scraping and saving raw data from online communities; parsing the data into a format that can be queried effectively; extracting subsets of the data which can be processed by analytical tools; and finally analyzing the data and producing results. This workshop will focus on methods, tools, and techniques for overcoming the challenges associated with each stage of this process. Researchers will present work detailing their approaches and the results they have achieved, and will discuss new approaches and consider their application.
WORKSHOP DETAILS
Overview:
Systems for computer mediated social interaction provide unprecedented research opportunities and new challenges for social scientists. The challenges stem from the scale, complexity, and structure of the data, raising issues of data management, manipulation, aggregation and analysis. We propose a workshop where researchers discuss their approaches to overcoming these challenges, and share the results of their research. The workshop will focus on research methods and results related to analysis of social network data extracted from online communities.
Peoples' use of online resources is becoming increasingly social, collaborative and complex. Whether they are posting messages, editing files, sharing comments, or writing code, users of online communities leave traces of their behavior and the structure of their interaction. These traces are like footprints in the sand, but they are not wiped away by the tide; instead they accrete leaving incredibly detailed records of social interaction. These social accretions present researchers with an opportunity to study, at an unprecedented scale and scope, the dynamics, structure, and results of social interaction. These records also promise to provide insight into the fundamental questions of social interaction (how do norms emerge? what makes some groups succeed and thrive while others wither?), but those answers are only available if the artifacts of interactions are collected, organized and arranged for analysis.
Like seawater, internet mediated data can be abundant but frustratingly difficult to consume. Simply collecting internet data at large scales can be a challenge without sophisticated technical skills and potentially significant infrastructure. Nonetheless, these challenges are being reduced through the spread of standardized techniques and dropping costs of equipment. Additionally, many internet based social phenomena occur at tractable scales and can be analyzed with desktop or laptop class equipment, using readily available software and data already present.
Analyzing this data involves several stages of processing: scraping information from available online data sources and saving that data in its raw form; parsing it into a data format that can be queried effectively, such as a relational database; extracting meaningful subsets of the data into a data format which can be easily processed by analytical tools; and finally analyzing the data and producing results. This workshop will focus on methods, tools, and techniques for overcoming the challenges associated with each stage of the process. We invite researchers to present work detailing their approaches and the results they have achieved, and to discuss new approaches and consider their application in their own work.
Workshop details:
Maximum 10 presenters, plus 20-30 non-presenting participants. We will make a call for papers and will actively encourage participation from leading researchers who work with large datasets derived from systems of online interaction. We will organize the session around themes, where each theme includes a set of brief presentations with at least half of the time devoted to discussion. The goal of this workshop will be for these researchers to exchange ideas and methodological approaches, and to improve upon the current research methodologies employed in this field. We will hold an open enrollment for non-presenters interested in playing an active role in the discussion. We will combine the workshop with a collaborative weblog in order to retain and extend aspects of the conversation.
Deadlines:
Deadline for paper submissions will be April 30th, 2007. Notification and reviewer comments will be returned to authors by May 18th, 2007. We will screen submissions for quality and relevance to the workshop. Additional workshop participants will be accepted on a rolling basis until May 18th, or until all available slots have been filled
