Hi all,
Really exciting new special issue on semantic media that may be of interest
to Wikipedia/Wikidata researchers. See below and let me know if you have
any questions! Abstract deadline is July 15.
All best,
Heather (and Andrew)
*---------------------------*
*Dr Heather Ford*
Associate Professor and Head of Discipline, Digital and Social Media
<https://www.uts.edu.au/future-students/communication/digital-and-social-med…>
School of Communication
<https://www.uts.edu.au/future-students/communication/about-communication/we…>
, University of Technology, Sydney <https://www.uts.edu.au/> (UTS)
Affiliate: UTS Data Science Institute
<https://www.uts.edu.au/data-science-institute> | Associate: UTS Centre for
Media Transition
<https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/centre-media-tran…>
| Associate Member: UTS Centre for Research on Education in a Digital
Society
<https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/our-research/centre-research-e…>
w: hblog.org / t: @hfordsa <http://www.twitter.com/hfordsa> / pronouns:
she/her
*University of Technology Sydney*
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
PO Box 123. Broadway NSW 2007 Australia
I acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and the Boorooberongal
People of the Dharug Nation upon whose ancestral lands our campuses now
stand. I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging, acknowledging
them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.
*Call for Papers*
*Social Media + Society** Special Issue: Semantic Media*
*Editors: Andrew Iliadis and Heather Ford*
This special issue focuses on “semantic media,” which we define as media
technologies that primarily orchestrate and convey facts, answers,
meanings, and “knowledge” about things directly in media products, rather
than lead people to other sources. Search engines and virtual assistants
respond directly to questions based on textual or verbal searches (e.g.,
“Things to do in Philadelphia?” or “What is the capital of Israel?”). The
special issue is thus dedicated to the often-invisible ways (to the
non-specialist) that internet companies are now actively involved in
constructing “knowledge” about the world. Organizations like Apple, Google,
Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon extract, curate, and store facts served to
users in new and emerging media products. Such processes have significant
implications for the politics of knowledge sharing in the future.
We seek papers that examine how design decisions “bake” these facts into
the apps and platforms people use daily while focusing on the
infrastructures dedicated to orchestrating and presenting this information.
The goal is to understand the technologies that will drive social and
political outcomes when large internet companies become a primary conduit
through which people directly acquire an understanding of facts about the
world. We also seek to understand how governments, nonprofit, and
nongovernmental organizations engage these media technologies. Semantic
media are less about searching for keywords and matches on different
websites that are then ranked for people to choose. Instead, they deal with
identifying and describing entities (things like people, products, and
places) and directing interactions with those entities (actions like
purchasing, scheduling, and contacting). How do semantic media identify
concepts and connect related information about them? How do companies and
organizations produce facts and organize the data? From where does the data
originate? What do these semantic processes mean for web users and
administrators? What types of gatekeeping or safety checks do companies and
organizations perform concerning these facts?
Today’s semantic media have a long history reaching back to the “Semantic
Web” project initiated by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Yet, media
researchers do not adequately cover how companies and organizations
implement semantic technologies on platforms relative to their central
role. These semantic technologies are in proprietary and open source
products, and extensive media platforms are now using them to provide facts
and represent knowledge to various publics. Google’s Knowledge Graph is a
database of facts that Google uses to provide quick answers to the public,
and such graphs are in use at other companies. At the same time, Wikipedia
has a product called Wikidata that similarly stores facts about the world
in data formats through which various apps can retrieve the data.
Researchers and journalists also use semantic technologies for search
engine optimization, fact-checking practices, and data sharing and
organization. This special issue thus focuses on such platformized versions
of fact production and examines the underlying infrastructures, histories,
and modeling techniques used in knowledge representation systems.
We are interested in quantitative, qualitative, and critical approaches and
papers that propose new methods, theories, and frameworks.
*Areas of interest:*
• The creation or transmission of facts, answers, meanings,
definitions, and “knowledge” across media systems and their platforms
• Answers from virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana,
Bixby, etc.
• Answers from search engines such as Google, Bing, Baidu,
Yandex, etc.
• Products like knowledge panels, infoboxes, carousels, rich
results, maps, etc.
• Open-source semantic technologies such as Schema.org, Wikidata,
etc.
• Proprietary semantic technologies such as Google’s Knowledge
Graph, etc.
• Fact-checking practices for misinformation and disinformation
across semantic media platforms
• Search engine optimization and semantic search practices
• Semantic infrastructure projects such as the semantic web,
linked data, etc.
• Semantic governance organizations such as the World Wide Web
Consortium, etc.
• Semantic technologies such as metadata, markup languages,
knowledge bases, knowledge graphs, web schemas, applied ontologies, and
enterprise semantic software
• Semantic, linguistic, and conceptual theories involving rules
and logic, theories of meaning, ontology, taxonomy, ideas of truth, social
ontology, etc.
*Timeline:*
• Extended 1000-word abstracts due Fri July 15
• Decisions out to authors Fri Aug 19
• Full 8000-word manuscript due Fri Nov 18
• Final decisions January 2023
• Submit to journal February 2023
• Publication spring 2023
*Send submissions to andrew.iliadis(a)temple.edu <andrew.iliadis(a)temple.edu>
and heather.ford(a)uts.edu.au <heather.ford(a)uts.edu.au> with the subject
header “Social Media + Society Special Issue: Semantic Media”*
*Link: *https://journals.sagepub.com/page/sms/collections/cfp
We want to remind you that the submission deadline for the LinkedArchives
workshop in conjunction with the 26th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2022) is approaching.
Please submit your contributions until *May 29*.
Best,
Carla Teixeira Lopes
(on behalf of the Organizing Committee)
-----------
We are thrilled to announce that the 2nd edition of the International
Workshop on Archives and Linked Data (https://linkedarchives.inesctec.pt/)
will be run in conjunction with the 26th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2022) (http://tpdl2022.dei.unipd.it/
).
The workshop aims to gather researchers and specialists who are engaged in
initiatives that cross Archives and the Semantic Web and those planning
similar initiatives in cultural heritage organizations.
We'd love to have your contributions, so please take a look at the call:
https://linkedarchives.inesctec.pt/#submission.
Please note that *29 May 2022* is the submission deadline.
The workshop will include invited talks, presentations of papers and demos,
as well as an opportunity for participants to meet and discuss latest
developments and opportunities in the field.
TPDL 2022 aims to be an in-presence event in Padua, Italy. TPDL will
publish the proceedings of the workshops and the doctoral consortium in the
CEUR Workshop Series. Extended versions of the best papers will be selected
to be published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
(JOCCH).
We look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you in September!
Hello all,
The next *Wikidata Bug Triage Hour session* will take place on Thursday, *May
5th, at 16:00 UTC* (18:00 CEST) on Jitsi.
This meeting is open to everyone involved in Wikidata and interested in
following the progress of the software development, or having specific
issues or requests related to software. During this session, we look at
tickets of our tracking system Phabricator, we improve their description,
tags and keywords together, in order to make them more understandable and
easier to discover and to pick by a development team or a volunteer in the
future.
The upcoming session doesn't have a specific topic, it's an open
discussion, so you are welcome to join and *bring a Phabricator task that
you particularly care about or that deserves some love*.
The meeting is taking place on Jitsi, it is not recorded in video but we
are taking collaborative notes. You can find all the links and information
here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events#Wikidata_bug_triage_hour
And finally: there is no prerequisite or need to have participated in
previous sessions to join - you can also join only to listen and *discover
more about how we track and describe bugs and feature requests for Wikidata
:)*
Looking forward to meet you there!
--
Léa Lacroix
Community Engagement Coordinator
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
The Search Platform Team
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Search_Platform> usually holds an
open meeting on the first Wednesday of each month. Come talk to us about
anything related to Wikimedia search, Wikidata Query Service (WDQS),
Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS), etc.!
Feel free to add your items to the Etherpad Agenda for the next meeting.
Details for our next meeting:
Date: Wednesday, May 4th, 2022
Time: 15:00-16:00 GMT / 08:00-09:00 PDT / 11:00-12:00 EDT / 16:00-17:00 WAT
/ 17:00-18:00 CEST
Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Search_Platform_Office_Hours
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/vgj-bbeb-uyi
Join by phone: https://tel.meet/vgj-bbeb-uyi?pin=8118110806927
Hope to talk to you next week!
—Trey
Trey Jones
Staff Computational Linguist, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
UTC–4 / EDT