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Dates: April 3-4, 2009
Proposal Deadline: January 7, 2009
Location: Amherst, Massachusetts
Website: http://youtube08election.crowdvine.com/ 

A two-day conference jointly hosted by: The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)
 
Keynote Speakers
Day 1: Richard Rogers, Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Director of govcom.org <http://govcom.org/> . Dr. Rogers is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or 'recommender' cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer.

Day 2: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities.  Specifically, his research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, science and engineering communities, disaster response teams, public health networks, digital media and learning networks, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life.

Approach
The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly endorses new and experimental approaches involving collaboration with information and computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:
 
- citizen initiated campaign videos,
- candidates' use of YouTube,
- bloggers use of YouTube to influence the primaries or election,
- the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the election cycle,
- the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or voting behavior,
- social network analysis of YouTube and related election-oriented sites,
- political theory or communication theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election,
- new metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect" on elections,
- archives for saving and tools for mapping the full landscape of YouTube election content,
- use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral politics, or
- reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube.

Paper Submissions
Authors are invited to prepare and submit to JITP a manuscript following one of the six submission formats by January 7, 2009. These formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes, review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States."

How to Submit
Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper via the JITP web site is documented at <http://www.jitp.net/> http://www.jitp.net/. <http://www.jitp.net/>  Papers will be put through an expedited blind peer review process by the Program Committee and authors will be notified about a decision by February 15, 2009. A small number of papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Other paper authors will be invited to present a poster during the Friday evening reception. All posters must include a "YouTube" version of their research findings.
 

Conference Co-Chairs
Stuart Shulman, University of Pittsburgh shulman@pitt.edu 
Michael Xenos, Louisiana State University xenos@lsu.edu