Last Call for Program Committee Volunteers - Please reply directly to stuart.shulman@gmail.com if you are interested in joining the Program Committee.

DRAFT - Call for Papers - DRAFT

"YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States" April xx-xx, 2009

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, University of Amsterdam, Director, 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.

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
We welcome both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly encourages 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,
- 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,
- political theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election,
- new tools and metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect,"
- the 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 a manuscript following one of the six JITP submission formats by January 10, 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." Authors of accepted papers will be notified by March 1, 2008.

How to Submit
Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper is documented at http://www.jitp.net/. Papers will be put through a blind peer review process and authors will be notified about
a decision by March 1, 2008.

Best Paper Prize
The author or authors of the best paper will receive a single $1,000 prize.

Conference Chair
Stuart Shulman

Program Committee
Sam Abrams
Ryan Biava
Bob Boynton
Andrew Chadwick
Jane Fountain
Jeff Guliati
Matthew Hale
Justin Holmes
Mike Margolis
Andrew McCallum
Toni Pole
Stephen Purpura
Jeff Seifert
Mack Shelley
Charlie Schweik
Christine Williams