WebSci’23 Travel Grants

15th ACM Web Science Conference: Inequalities in the Face of Concurrent Crises
30 April – 1 May 2023
Austin, Texas, USA (and online)
https://websci23.webscience.org/

WebSci and SIGWEB are pleased to announce the availability of a fund to help support attendance to WebSci 2023 in Austin, TX, USA.

Travel Grants
WebSci’23 travel grants provide support up to $1,500 for students, early career scholars and other presenters from underrepresented regions, who have an accepted paper at the conference and submit scholarship applications by March 26, 2023. In the event that scholarship applications exceed available funds, preference will be given to presenters from underrepresented regions who are planning to attend the whole Web Conference. This fund offsets travel costs but won’t cover registration.

To apply for the Travel Grant Program, please complete the online application at the link below no later than March 26, 2023. Notifications will be sent by March 31.

Free Online Tickets (for virtual attendance)
WebSci free online tickets are intended to help students to attend the conference virtually. In the event that requests exceed available tickets, preference will be given to students who are presenting a paper and those who are from underrepresented regions. To apply for a free ticket, please complete the online application at the link below by March 26, 2023.

To apply for either kind of support, kindly submit this very simple form: https://forms.gle/pLvQg7vjwYpXieXLA

Best wishes

WebSci’23 Conference Committee

Call for Interest: WebSci’24 and WebSci’25

Deadline: 3 February 2023

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The Steering Committee of ACM WebSci is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 16th or 17th ACM Web Science Conferences (WebSci 2024 and WebSci 2025). The conference series usually moves between the continents.  We will accept bids from all locations, but for the 2024 conference, we will give preference to bids within Europe and for the 2025 conference, we will give preference to bids outside Europe. We expect the conference to take place in June/July each year. Co-location with other ACM conferences will be considered and hosting the conference as a hybrid event is encouraged.  Please include a statement on how you would propose offering remote attendance.

The process consists of two stages. During this first stage, the Steering Committee solicits informal statements of interest through an open call. We will prefer statements that commit to running an event with low registration costs encouraging participants from all disciplines, including ones with lower financial provisions.

Organizations wishing to host the conference should contact Susan Davies (sdd1@soton.ac.uk) with a short paragraph outlining your interest, which should include the main organizer, the proposed venue and potential dates. Any organization can apply to host the conference, but the local organizing committee must include a representative of a local research group.

Once the first phase is complete, the Steering Committee will shortlist applications who will be invited to submit a full proposal.

The important dates for applying to host the Conferences are:

Friday 3 February:  Deadline for receiving statements of interest
Friday 17  February:  Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out
Friday 31 March: Formal applications received from shortlisted bids

We will be in touch with successful applicants in mid-April.

It is anticipated that the venue for ACM WebSci 2024 will be announced at this year’s conference in Austin, Texas

ACM WebSci’22: Call for participation

It is still time to register for this year’s ACM Web Science Conference!

The ACM Web Science Conference will take place in Barcelona on June 26-29, 2022 and will be co-located with UMAP’22 and HT’22 conferences. WebSci’22 is organized as a hybrid conference and will also enable online participation.

Registration
Registration fees start at 50,- Euro (online attendance, student rate). Additional options for discounted tickets are available (including a limited number of free admissions for researchers from countries designated as “economically developing”). All details about registration fees can be found online.

Conference Program
You can access the full conference schedule with the keynotes and all the paper sessions, including topics such as “Crowds and Social Movements”, “Health” and “Harmful Content Detection”.

The conference will feature two keynotes and we are excited to announce our invited speakers: m.c. schraefel(University of Southampton) and Leila Zia (Wikimedia Foundation).

We are also happy to announce the accepted workshops and tutorials for this year, which cover a wide range of topics and are open for participation:

  • General Collective Intelligence and Web Science
  • Documenting Web Data for Social Research (#DocuWeb22)
  • 1st Workshop on Blockchain and AI for Community
  • Assessing The Ethical Implications Of Artificial Intelligence In Policing
  • Coornet: detecting problematic online coordinated link-sharing behavior

Also, we encourage you to attend and register to Brave Conversations side event that will also run on Sunday 26th.

PhD Posters
We are considering the option to host posters for phd candidates to present their thesis topics and/or for late breaking research results during the conference as a networking opportunity. In case you would be interested in presenting your phd topic or recent research as a poster onsite in Barcelona, please reach out to us before June 10th.

All the information is available at https://websci22.webscience.org/

The WebSci’22 organizing committee

WebSci21 – Video Vault No 11 – The Future of the Web and Society

Chair, Wendy Hall leads panellists, Sinan Aral, Azeem Azhar, Noshir Contractor and Jaime Teevan in a discussion no less ambitious than to summarise what we learned from the last 15 years of Web Science and to predict what the next 15 years may hold.

Keynote 5

Abstract

Web Science, as an interdiscipline, is celebrating its 15th year of interrogating how the Web has shaped Society and how Society, in turn, has shaped the Web. During this period, we have witnessed avalanches of disruptive “exponential” technologies emerge from tectonic shifts between four (or more!) Internets with their various sensibilities and sensitivities concerning openness, commerce, authoritarianism and human rights. The closing panel reflects on how all of these socio-cultural-political developments (re)shape the agenda for Web Science over the next 15 years and beyond. Specifically, panelists will consider the future of Web Science research and what it means for practitioners, policy makers and publics.

Summary


Chair, Wendy Hall leads panellists in a discussion to summarise what we learned from the last 15 years of Web Science and to predict what the next 15 years may hold.

About the Video Vault Series

In partnership with the ACM we are pleased to be able to release a series of videos from the most recent Web Science Conference (ACM WebSci’21) that were previously only available to attendees of the conference.

The series will be released fortnightly and will include a selection of Keynote talks and Spotlight panel discussions.

Copyright / Links

This video is (c) 2021 provided under license from the ACM.

 

WebSci21 – Video Vault No 10 – The Post-API Age Reconsidered

In this talk, Deen Freelon talks about research data sourced from social media platforms to support computational research approaches in social science .

Keynote 5

Notes

Despite its brevity, the essay “Computational research in the post-API age” (Freelon, 2018) sparked an interdisciplinary discussion about options for collecting and analyzing social media data at a time when platforms were imposing tight restrictions on their formerly open APIs or closing them altogether. This keynote will explore some of what has and has not changed in the ensuing three years for computational researchers interested in social media data. In particular, it will focus on three key issues that have increased greatly in prominence since 2018: (1) the process of collaborating directly with social media companies on research projects, (2) the ethics of hacked and leaked datasets, and (3) ethno-racial and gender inequities in web- and computational social science.

Freelon, D. (2018). Computational research in the post-API age. Political Communication, 35(4), 665-668.

Summary


Deen Freelon talks about research data sourced from social media platforms to support computational research approaches in social science and whether both accessibility and representation have changed in the intervening period since his influential 2018 paper.

About the Video Vault Series

In partnership with the ACM we are pleased to be able to release a series of videos from the most recent Web Science Conference (ACM WebSci’21) that were previously only available to attendees of the conference.

The series will be released fortnightly and will include a selection of Keynote talks and Spotlight panel discussions.

Copyright / Links

This video is (c) 2021 provided under license from the ACM.

 

WebSci’22 Registration is open

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14th ACM Web Science Conference 2022 (WebSci’22)
26-29 June, 2022
Hybrid conference: Barcelona, Spain, and online (co-located with Hypertext 2022 and UMAP 2022 )
https://websci22.webscience.org/

This year, the ACM Web Science Conference will run in hybrid mode. Both online and in-person presentations will be streamed, and most of the activities will be set up to increase the experience for in-person interaction.

The WebSci’22 conference organizers seek to foster an accessible and inclusive conference. They recognize that ACM WebSci’22 attendees have differing abilities to pay, and have instituted a tiered pricing program to accommodate different financial needs.

For more information and to register go to

https://websci22.webscience.org/registration/