Call for Submissions

Overview

The UK ESRC funded National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS) was formed in 2004 to explore how new forms of distributed, computer-based infrastructure (known as the 'Grid' in the UK and 'cyberinfrastructure' in the US) can be applied to benefit the social sciences. Essentially, cyberinfrastructure is the computing and networking technologies that will enable the discovery, access to, integration, manipulation, analysis and display of the huge bodies of digital data that are becoming available. (See the report of the 2005 NSF workshop on cyberinfrastructure for the social sciences (PDF) for examples of potential impact.)

In 2005, NCeSS inaugurated the annual International Conference on e-Social Science to provide a forum for researchers to meet and exchange experiences and ideas on how the Grid might benefit social science research. (Programs of the 2005 Conference and the 2006 Conference are online.) This year, the NSF and ESRC have joined together to bring the 2007 conference to the USA.

The aim of this third conference in the series is to bring together international representatives of the social science and cyberinfrastructure research communities in order to create better mutual awareness, harmonize understanding, and instigate coordinated activities to accelerate research, development, and deployment of cyberinfrastructure to support the social science research community. A related objective is to articulate both the technical and social/organizational prerequisites for success in these endeavours.

We invite contributions from members of the social science and cyberinfrastructure research communities with experience of -- or interests in -- exploring, developing, and applying new methods, practices, and tools that are facilitated by cyberinfrastructure in order to further social science research, and in studying the wider development of cyberinfrastructure-enabled research and its component technologies. Submission categories include full and short papers, posters, and workshops.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Case studies of social science research methods, applications, and practices enabled by cyberinfrastructures and tools
• Benefits and challenges of large scale, distributed, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research facilitated by cyberinfrastructure
• New cyberinfrastructure and tools for sociological data integration, sharing, access management and security, data analysis, and curation
• New cyberinfrastructure and tools for enabling new sources of data and new methods for data collection
• Ethical issues, challenges, and solutions raised by cyberinfrastructure for the collection, integration, sharing, and analysis of personal, social, economic, and other data such as medical records or genomics
• Case studies of socio-technical issues in the design and development of e-Research methods, technologies, and tools, including usability issues and solutions

Enquires about the suitability of topics should be made to (contact information to come).

Submission requirements for full and short papers and posters

Note that the Paper proposal submission deadline has passed.

Authors are requested to submit an abstract of up to 500 words as their poster proposal.

Please indicate the category of your submission: full paper (10 pages), short paper (4 pages), or poster and include the contact details of the main author.

Submit here.

Submissions will be subject to independent review, and a final decision will be made by the conference program committee. Authors of submissions not accepted as full papers may be invited to submit a short paper or poster instead.

Accepted full and short papers will be published in the conference proceedings.

Formats for camera-ready copies of full and short papers and posters will be available for download from the conference Web site.

Submission requirements for workshops

Note that the Workshop proposal submission deadline has passed.

See the Workshops page for further information on submitting workshop proposals.

Deadlines

(Deadlines are midnight EDT (GMT -0400) of the day indicated.)

Paper abstracts: May 15th, 2007.

• Authors will be informed of the program committee's decision on paper submissions in early July, 2007.
• Final drafts of accepted papers will be due at the end of August, 2007.

Doctoral Colloquium applications: May 30th, 2007.

Workshop outlines: May 31st, 2007.

• Notification of workshop proposal acceptance will be in mid-June, 2007.

Poster abstracts: June 30th, 2007.

If you have other questions about e-Social Science 2007, you can contact the Program Committee co-chairs at ess2007program-at- umich -dot- edu .