ANNOUNCING THE NEXT AOIR CONFERENCE CFP! [Please feel free to circulate widely]: **************************************** Internet Research 8.0: Let¹s Play! International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Workshops: October 17, 2007 AoIR conference: October 1820, 2007 Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2007 Let¹s Play The Internet better, internet/s - is at once part of the background hum of the developed world and an exotic realm of fantasy and play. It is an essential, mundane part of daily life, and simultaneously radical, revolutionary, profane, and fun. Internet/s invite us to play. We surf, blog, role play, and chat in the interest of work, learning, and play. Serious technologies and applications invite playing around as a way to learn how to use them. Playful applications take root in serious business, as online chat becomes a business communication tool. Games find applications in education, business, and war. Playful blogging evolves into a social and political force to be reckoned with. We play with our identity online, shaping current and future roles offline. The play goes on Our conference theme of play invites empirical research and theoretical reflection on how human beings ³seriously play² with one another on, via and through internet/s, on local, regional, and global scales. We call for papers that explore the intersection of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane, the revolutionary and the mundane, and fantasy and the reality. CALL FOR PAPERS We call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and communities, that address the (playful) blurring of boundaries online. The following TOPICS are suggestions simply intended to spark initial reflection and creativity: - Mundanity implies normalcy, and thereby, the efforts to understand and regulate online interactions in ways that are analogous to and consistent with offline practices and norms (e.g., privacy protection, norms for community interaction, efforts to regulate information flows involving pornography, hate speech, etc.). As internet/s become interwoven with ordinary life on multiple levels, in what ways do these alter ordinary life, and/or how do prevailing community and cultural practices reshape and tame¹ such internet/s and the interactions they facilitate? - Global diffusion: how do internet/s, as they exponentially diffuse throughout the globe facilitate flows of information, capital, labor, immigration and play and what are the implications of these new flows for life offline? - eLearning: how can such practices as distance learning and serious games utilize the liminal domain (the threshold world of dream and myth, in which important new skills, insights, and abilities are gained in the process of growing up) to go beyond traditional ways of learning? Are they necessarily better, or easier, to use or to learn from? - Identity, community, and global communications: how will processes of identity play and development continue, and/or change as the role and place of the Internet in peoples lives shift in new ways including the expansion of mobile access to internet/s? - E-health: what do new developments in sharing medical information online and expanding telemedicine technologies into new domains imply for traditional physician-centered medicine, patient privacy, etc.? - Digital art: from downloading commercially-offered ringtones to facilitating cross-cultural / cross-disciplinary collaborations in the creation of art, internet/s expand familiar aesthetic experiences and open up new possibilities for aesthetic creativity: how are traditional understandings of aesthetic experience affected and how do new creative / aesthetic / playful possibilities affect human ³users² of art? - Games and gaming: the average gamer in North America is now a twenty-something whose lifestyle is more mainstream than adolescent. As games and gamers ³grow up² and as games continue their diffusion into new demographic categories while they simultaneously continue to push the envelopes of Internet and computer technologies what can we discern of new possibilities for identity play, community building, and so forth? Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference theme, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on that theme. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, economic, and/or aesthetic aspects of the Internet beyond the conference theme - e.g., in CSCW and other forms of online collaboration, distance learning, etc. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members. SUBMISSIONS We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference papers, but we also encourage proposals for creative or aesthetic presentations that are distinct from a traditional written paper.¹ We also welcome proposals for roundtable sessions that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized panel proposals that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme. - PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 500-750 words - CREATIVE OR AESTHETIC PRESENTATIONS - submit abstract of 500-750 words - PANELS - submit a 500-750 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation - ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting OR submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them. Detailed information about submission and review is available at the conference submission website http://conferences.aoir.org [available December 1, 2006]. All proposals must be submitted electronically through this site. PUBLICATION OF PAPERS Several publishing opportunities are expected to be available through journals, based on peer-review of full papers. The website will contain more details. GRADUATE STUDENTS Graduate students are strongly encouraged to submit proposals. Any student paper is eligible for consideration for the AoIR graduate student award. Students wishing to be a candidate for the Student Award must send a final paper by June 30, 2007. PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS Prior to the conference, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining its relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquires regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to the Conference Chair and no later than March 31, 2007. DEADLINES Submission site available: December 1, 2006 Proposal submission deadline: February 1, 2007 Presenter notification: March 31, 2007 Final workshop submission deadline: March 31, 2007 Submission for student award competition: June 30, 2007 Submission for conference archive: July 31, 2007 SUBMISSION OF FULL PAPERS Full papers and a conference registration by at least one of the paper authors must be in place by July 31, 2007 for papers to be presented. Formatting: Please submit papers in PDF with simple formatting, using sans serif font and in-text referencing. If you can't submit in PDF, use DOC or RTF format. Submission process: Submit full papers to aoir2007@gmail.com by July 31, 2007. CONTACT INFORMATION Program Chair: Dr. Mia Consalvo, Ohio University <consalvo@ohio.edu> Conference Chair: Dr. Richard Smith, Simon Fraser University <smith@sfu.ca> Vice-President of AoIR: Dr. Charles Ess, Drury University <cmess@drury.edu> Association Website: http://www.aoir.org Conference Website: http://conferences.aoir.org ****************************************************************