Newswise — The University of Massachusetts Amherst is hosting a two-day conference April 16-17 that examines the electoral impact of user-created YouTube content on the 2008 election. Conference participants will also discuss new technical and analytic opportunities associated with new media technologies and politics.
The conference, "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States," will take place on the 10th floor of the Campus Center at UMass Amherst. It brings together social and computer scientists to examine the use of new and evolving technology in political campaigns.
There are two keynote speakers. On April 16, discussion will focus on digital methods and their distinctiveness for researching Internet cultures.
Keynote speaker Richard Rogers of the University of Amsterdam, and director of www.govcom.org, 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.
On April 17, the talk by Noshir Contractor will explore how YouTube can serve as a testbed to help advance our understanding of the emergence of social and knowledge networks.
Contractor is 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. He is the director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern. Contractor is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. 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.
The conference is co-sponsored by the UMass Amherst departments of political science, computer science and communication; the Center for Public Policy and Administration; Panopto; TubeKit; the National Center for Digital Government; the Qualitative Data Analysis Program; the Science, Technology and Society Initiative; the Journal of Information Technology and Politics; and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. It is supported by grants from the Research Leadership in Action Program in the Office of Research and Engagement at UMass Amherst and the National Science Foundation.
For information and registration, go to: http://www.umass.edu/polsci/youtube/
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