*CFP* CALL FOR PAPERS, ECREA HEALTH COMMUNICATION TWG AND EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON HEALTH COMMUNICATION

Please consider submitting to this minitrack of HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, which is hosting its 53rd annual conference in January 2020 in Maui, Hawaii.

The Mediated Conversation minitrack focuses on the study of conversations taking place on digital and social media. Conversations are at the core of human communication.  Mediated conversations can use text, audio, images or video, or any combination thereof. The minitrack welcomes research on conversations that are interpersonal, as well as those that occur in organizational or mass communication, educational or political contexts, and in any other sphere of human activity, including the emerging interplay of human-machine communication.

Submission

Some examples of highly cited papers that first appeared in this minitrack include: Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, by Honey & Herring; Talk before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia, by Viégas, Wattenberg, Kriss and van Ham; You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups, by Fisher, Smith and Welser; Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter, by boyd, Golder and Lotan; and, Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft, by Nardi, Ly and Harris.

This minitrack brings together researchers and innovators to explore mediated conversation and its implications; to raise new socio-technical, ethical, pedagogical, linguistic, and social questions; and to suggest new methods, perspectives, and design approaches. The Mediated Conversation minitrack is the successor of the Persistent Conversation minitrack established by Tom Erickson and Susan Herring at HICSS in 1999, which was originally focused on the novelty of conversational persistence. With the prevalence of mediated conversation, we are called upon to consider a wider field of issues.

Examples of appropriate topics include, but are not limited to:

• Innovation in mediated conversational practice 
• The dynamics and analysis of large-scale conversation systems (e.g., MOOCs and big data applications) 
• Methods for analyzing mediated conversation: qualitative, quantitative, data analytics, etc. 
• Mediated collaboration 
• The dark side of mediated conversation: e.g., loafing, hate speech, bullying, and communication overload 
• Studies of virtual communities or other sites of mediated conversation 
• Ethics and mediated conversation: privacy, deception, freedom of speech, security, and information warfare 
• The role of mediated conversation in knowledge management 
• The role of mediated conversation in organizations 
• Domain-specific applications, opportunities, and challenges of mediated conversations and conversational exchanges (e.g., in education, healthcare, social movements, government, citizen participation, and news media) 
• Conversation visualization 
• The role of listeners, lurkers, and silent interactions 
• Novel properties of mediated conversation 
• A platform’s role in mediating the conversation 
• Power dynamics and conversational patterns among users of social media 
• The role of conversation in understanding the interplay between media producers and media audiences 
• Human-machine communication and related conversations (e.g., chatbots)

Fast-track journal opportunity: Authors of papers accepted for presentation in the minitrack will be offered the opportunity to submit an extended version of their papers for consideration for fast-track publication in the ACM journal ACM Transaction on Social Computing.

Important dates:

June 15 | 11:59 pm HST: Paper submission deadline.

August 17 | 11:59 pm HST: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection

September 4 | 11:59 pm HST: Deadline for authors to submit the revised version of papers accepted with mandatory changes (A-M)

September 11: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection for A-M papers

September 22: Deadline for authors to submit final manuscript for publication

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Sheizaf Rafaeli (Primary Contact) University of Haifa sheizaf@rafaeli.net

Seth C. Lewis University of Oregon sclewis@uoregon.edu

Yoram M. Kalman The Open University of Israel yoramka@openu.ac.il