HICSS 2014 Digital and Social Media Track

The Digital & Social Media track of the Hawai'i International Conference on System Science (HICS) is a convening platform for researchers to share and discuss their cutting-edge research on digital and social media. Defined in a broad sense, digital media are digitized content (text, graphics, audio/video) that can be archived and transmitted over multiple networks such as cable, satellite, telecommunications, and broadband networks to a variety of digital devices from mainframe systems to individual smart phones. Social media describes the collection of web and mobile-based technologies that mediate human and social communication via social networks and that enable individuals, groups and communities to gather, communicate and share information, to collaborate or to play. Digital and social media research are closely related, as both address basic communications processes (defined as the sharing of meaning) and increasingly critical as the role of networks and other digital technologies become an anchor for change in societies. The track includes nine mini-tracks on a variety of topics.

You can see the best papers for the minitracks .

The track chairs are:

The HICSS Digital and Social Media Track includes the following mini-tracks for the 2014 conference. Please feel free to contact the mini-track chairs for guidance on planned papers. More details on the conference can be found at: .

This minitrack focuses on online interactions for knowledge production on crowd-sourced sites. As various forms of collaboration are enabled (and constrained) by the affordances available in social media, researchers are investigating a range of issues including: 1) the diverse ways in which people collaborate to create, manage, curate and manipulate online content and how these activities affect digital repositories; 2) how those who manage these repositories are responding to the dynamics of online co-creation of content; 3) the dynamics of crowd-sourced online collaborations and online communities of practice; and 4) the ways in which we can best describe the socio-technical interaction networks that facilitate and inhibit mass knowledge production.

Social media is changing how we work and play. It is also changing the way we access and consume media, stay in touch with family and friends, as well as how we communicate within our on-line communities. One of the things these activities share in common is that they generate a tremendous volume of data that can be analyzed and mined for both research and commercial purposes. This mini-track focuses on research that brings together social media (or social networks) and data analytics & data mining. We welcome quantitative, theoretical or applied papers whose approaches are within the scope of data analytics and data mining, and closely related areas (e.g., data warehousing, content mining, network analysis, structure mining, business intelligence and knowledge discovery).

The social media is transforming the workplace. Increasingly companies are launching social media behind their firewalls to encourage employees to share information, locate expertise, and engage in collaborations. Companies such as Best Buy, Deloitte, Microsoft, and IBM have hosted their internal social networking sites to enhance their communication and collaboration within and across organizational boundaries. The proliferations of social media in organizations have opened up new opportunities, but at the same time it has also raised new work and workplace related concerns and challenges. We argue that in order for the organizations to amplify the returns and mitigate the drawbacks of using enterprise social media within their work environments, it is imperative to systematically and empirically examine work/job level issues and challenges. Therefore, in this mini-track we invite research on issues surrounding the role of social media in workplace with a special focus on work and job design and analysis.

This minitrack addresses the socio-materiality of information. The notion of document serves as one lens into the socio-material (and socio-technical) nature of what organizational members do day in and day out. Documents are socio-material in that they are both material--and, thus, embody the technical infrastructure--and social--as they embody both the work practices and shared understanding of those involved.

Network sciences focus on the structure of systems and how the elements of a system come together, often expressed as patterns or regularities in relationships among interacting units. Network analysis can reveal the underlying structures and help to discover the dynamic interactions among network components. Network science and the development of digital and social media have co-evolved as catalysts of each other’s development and advancement, and the increased use of social and digital media provides scientists with a wealth of precise and novel data. We welcome submissions that represent the insightful ways that network analysis can be used to better understand social and digital media. Both methodologically and theoretically driven papers are encouraged, as well as lines of research that are pushing the boundaries of network science as applied to social and digital media. Forward-thinking and boundary-spanning forms of research are particularly welcome.

This minitrack calls for papers that address leading edge use of technology, research methods and system design to analyze and support learning in social networks. The ability to generate and maintain rich networked connections through social media, social networking, crowdsourcing, cloud technology, and social computing has a profound impact on the way we solve problems, learn, innovate and develop our identities, and the value this creates for individuals and groups. This minitrack will bring together state of the art research that furthers social theories of networking and learning, such as social networking, networked learning, collaborative learning, viral learning, and social capital, in combination with for example social and learning analytics and social network analysis to help visualize, develop and facilitate formal, non-formal and informal networking and learning settings. We call for papers that use, analyze and/or develop technology and online tools to examine social networking and learning phenomena through social media. We specifically welcome papers that address new and exciting areas of research in the networking and learning potential of social media or the potential value social media creates for connectivity, development, and growth. Some of this work might be driven by social media and networking research in relation to gaming, simulation, 3d worlds, networks of practice, online communities or team learning.

We call for papers that address social networks and communities supported and/or complemented by social media for work, learning, socializing, economic and/or political processes, and/or that address design, practices, use or evaluation of such social media use. Papers are encouragd that address communities in a broad sense of its use, including communities of practice, epistemic communities, or communities of inquiry; as well as fully virtual communities, and social media use that supports or complements geographically based community. We particularly encourage papers that: advance our understanding of social network growth, formation, structure and outcomes through social media; advance out understanding of the design of social media technologies and practices for effective community development and maintenance; studies of socio-technical aspects of social media use that explore how the technology relates to social outcomes; theoretical studies that explore models and principles of social media design, use and outcomes.

In an increasingly digital culture, we are facing significant challenges in finding meaning in increasing massive amounts of text. Methods for retrieving information in large corpora of text are now well established. The next challenge is to extract the tacit knowledge in that text: it is no longer enough to find the needle in the haystack, we now need to understand how that knowledge relates to complex issues. That is, we need to be able to make sense of text data on a higher level. This minitrack will focus on systems and tools that will enable people to engage in meaningful ways with the information encapsulated in massive textual datasets. The discussions will centre on the extraction and visualization of concepts and relationships, real-time interaction with text datasets including novel visualization and interaction techniques for users.

Internet technologies now make it possible to produce new ideas, products, and services by catalyzing large-scale social networks and crowds. What do such social networks and crowds produce? What should they produce? What ideas, products, and services? While social networks assume organic growth and an embedding that takes place over time, crowds can be assembled rapidly. Between the two extremes are a host of different organizational structures, in which already committed members of a community are deployed to create or improve ideas. And the traces of these new organizations are also varied, ranging from ephemeral short messages to curated collaborative databases. The output often takes the form of digital media, and the organization often relies on social media. We are interested in empirical papers that observe or visualize the innovations produced by networks and crowds; theoretical papers that simulate this production through software; conceptual papers, which analyse the phenomena of the humanized web; and design research that creates and evaluates new tools and processes. We are particularly open to papers that explore unusual ways of modelling emergent organizations: models that demonstrate or reflect the influence of social systems on user behaviours, models that consider the multiple connections between people, technology, and institutions, models that break personal identity into sub-relations, and models that examine the emergence of roles, identity, and institutions. We are interested in applying the ideas of James March, Mark Granovetter, Harrison White, Charles Tilly and related scholars to information systems.