[ecrea] Researching Social Media conference CFP

Colleagues may be interested in this conference I'm organising. Full 
details on the website: 
http://researchingsocialmediaconference.wordpress.com/

As part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, this one-day conference 
on Researching Social Media is aimed at policy makers, the business 
community, third sector and academic researchers and pays specific 
attention to methods and analytical approaches.

The conference will be held on Monday 4 November 2013 at The Workstation 
in Sheffield opposite the Sheffield train station. The address: 15 
Paternoster Row, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S1 2BX. The conference is 
free to attend, but will be capped at 60 participants. Registration will 
open on 22 October 2013 (using Eventbrite) and tickets will be allocated 
on a first come first serve basis. Please check back to register.

The conference includes a keynote panel of leading social science, 
policy and industry researchers:

* Francesco D’Orazio (Face Research)
* Jennifer Jones (University of the West of Scotland, freelance creative 
practitioner)
* Gareth Morrell (NatCen, lead on New Social Media, New Social Science? 
(NSMNSS) Network)
* Katrin Weller (Information Scientist, GESIS Leibniz Institute for the 
Social Sciences)

The conference will also include three skills labs in two consecutive 
sessions so that participants have the option to go to two out of three. 
These will cover:

1. A comprehensive review of different tools available for social media 
research (led by Farida Vis, University of Sheffield);
2. Overview of quantitative approaches (led by Mike Thelwall, University 
of Wolverhampton);
3. An overview of qualitative approaches (led by Gareth Morrell and Eve 
Stirling, University of Sheffield).

The conference offers a timely and important overview of different 
critical methodological and analytical approaches for dealing with 
social media data in social scientific, reliable ways.

To compliment the discussions raised by the plenary panel and the 
practical advice and insight offered as part of the skills labs, we 
invite abstracts for a limited number of papers to fill one additional 
open session. We specifically invite work that can add to discussions 
about how social media research can lead to informed policy making. What 
are the obstacles? How can traditional social science methods be 
productively combined with innovative emerging methods for researching 
social media? How can we ensure that these new methods are reliable? 
What are the training needs in these areas? How can we address these?

We invite work that centrally engages with these issues and can further 
inform the discussions on the day. This may be work in progress as well 
as more formal papers. We are also open to shorter presentations that 
specifically address the different issues this kind of research may 
raise for policy making, including issues around ethics and (data) 
privacy concerns. The key dates are listed below:

+++++ Key dates +++++

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to: (rsmconf /at/ gmail.com)

* 18 October Abstract deadline
* 21 October Confirmation successful papers
* 22 October Registration opens

Please note that we also offer a number of travel bursaries, more 
information: 
http://researchingsocialmediaconference.wordpress.com/travel-bursaries/.

--
Dr Farida Vis
Research Fellow in the Social Sciences
Information School | University of Sheffield
E: (f.vis /at/ sheffield.ac.uk)
W: http://researchingsocialmedia.org/


---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service from ECREA and Nico Carpentier.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://www.ecrea.eu/mailinglist
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
--
Postal address:
ECREA
Chaussée de Waterloo 1151
1180 Uccle
Belgium
--
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------