WebSci’23 Call for Papers

About the Web Science Conference

Web Science is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex and multiple impacts of the Web on society and vice versa. The discipline is well situated to address pressing issues of our time by incorporating various scientific approaches. We welcome quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research, including techniques from the social sciences and computer science. In addition, we are interested in work exploring Web-based data collection and research ethics. We also encourage studies that combine analyses of Web data and other types of data (e.g., from surveys or interviews) and help better understand user behaviour online and offline.

2023 Emphasis: Inequalities in the Face of Concurrent Crises

Web-based technologies promise to lower the entry barrier for geographically-dispersed individuals to participate in everyday life. Especially in the aftermath of the pandemic and growing international tensions, such technologies have become critical to our lives. Yet, disparities between groups exist across digital spaces, including digital news, social media, and peer production. Research documenting inequities in representation, engagement, visibility, and success is essential to understand how, for example, various racial, ethnic, and gender groups rebound from multiple concurrent crises. This year’s conference especially encourages contributions documenting differential uses of online spaces and discussing ways to address emerging differences. Additionally, we welcome papers on a wide range of topics at the heart of Web Science.

Possible topics across methodological approaches and digital contexts include but are not limited to:

Understanding the Web

Trends in globalisation, fragmentation, rejoining, and Balkanisation of the Web

The architecture and philosophy of the Web

Automation and AI in all its manifestations relevant to the Web

Critical analyses of the Web and Web technologies

Making the Web Inclusive

Issues of discrimination and fairness

Intersectionality and design justice in questions of marginalisation and inequality

Ethical challenges of technologies, data, algorithms, platforms, and people on the Web

Safeguarding and governance of the Web, including anonymity, security and trust

Inclusion, literacy and the digital divide

The Web and Everyday Life

Social machines, crowd computing and collective intelligence

Web economics, social entrepreneurship, and innovation

Legal issues, including rights and accountability for AI actors

Humanities, arts, and culture on the Web

Politics and social activism on the Web

Online education and remote learning

Health and well-being online

Social presence in online professional event spaces

The Web as a source of news and information

Doing Web Science

Data curation, Web archives and stewardship in Web Science

Temporal and spatial dimensions of the Web as a repository of information

Analysis and modelling of human vs automatic behavior (e.g., bots)

Analysis of online social and information networks

Detecting, preventing and predicting anomalies in Web data (e.g., fake content, spam)

Format of the submissions
Please upload your submissions via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=websci23

There are two submission formats.
* Full paper should be between 6 and 10 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.). Full papers typically report on mature and completed projects.
* Short papers should be up to 5 pages (inclusive of references, appendices, etc.). Short papers will primarily report on high-quality ongoing work not mature enough for a full-length publication.

All accepted submissions will be assigned an oral presentation (of two different lengths).

All papers should adopt the current ACM SIG Conference proceedings template (acmart.cls). Please submit papers as PDF files using the ACM template, either in Microsoft Word format (available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template under “Word Authors”) or with the ACM LaTeX template on the Overleaf platform which is available https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-sig-proceedings-template/bmvfhcdnxfty. In particular, please ensure that you are using the two-column version of the appropriate template.

All contributions will be judged by the Program Committee upon rigorous peer review standards for quality and fit for the conference, by at least three referees. Additionally, each paper will be assigned to a Senior Program Committee member to ensure review quality.

WebSci-2023 review is double-blind. Therefore, please anonymize your submission: do not put the author(s) names or affiliation(s) at the start of the paper, and do not include funding or other acknowledgments in papers submitted for review. References to authors’ own prior relevant work should be included, but should not specify that this is the authors’ own work. It is up to the authors’ discretion how much to further modify the body of the paper to preserve anonymity. The requirement for anonymity does not extend outside of the review process, e.g. the authors can decide how widely to distribute their papers over the Internet. Even in cases where the author’s identity is known to a reviewer, the double-blind process will serve as a symbolic reminder of the importance of evaluating the submitted work on its own merits without regard to the authors’ reputation.

For authors who wish to opt-out of publication proceedings, this option will be made available upon acceptance. This will encourage the participation of researchers from the social sciences that prefer to publish their work as journal articles. All authors of accepted papers (including those who opt out of proceedings) are expected to present their work at the conference.

By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.

Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper.  ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors.  The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022.  We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.

Programme Committee Chairs:

Katherine Ognyanova (Rutgers University)
Harsh Taneja (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign)
Ingmar Weber (Saarland University)

For any questions and queries regarding the paper submission, please contact the chairs at websci23papers@easychair.org

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