April 16.2009 - April 17.2009

University of Massachusetts, Campus Center, 10th Floor, Amherst Room
Amherst, MA

The conference will feature two special talks: “Congressional Communication Via YouTube,” a special panel featuring three Communications Directors from Capitol Hill; and “Uploading Hope: An Inside View of Obama's HQ New Media Video Team,” a special talk by a member of the Obama Video Team.

In addition, we have lined up two amazing keynotes:

Day 1. “Digital Methods” Abridged Abstract: Digital studies on culture may be distinguished from cultural studies of the digital at least in terms of method. The lecture takes up the question of the distinctiveness of ‘digital methods’ for researching Internet cultures.

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. "Digital Traces: An Exploratorium for Understanding & Enabling Social Networks" Abridged Abstract: This talk will explore how YouTube can serve as a testbed to help advance our understanding of the emergence of social and knowledge networks.

Noshir Contractor, 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 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.

Please visit the conference website to register: http://www.umass.edu/polsci/youtube/

The conference 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 through grant no. SES 0903886. It is co-sponsored by the 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.