Dear AoIR-ists, On behalf of the Conference Co-Organizers, I'm very pleased to draw your attention to CaTaC¹14: Culture, Technology, Communication: Celebration, Transformation, New Directions. Please distribute and cross-post as appropriate. Venue: Department of Informatics, Ole-Johan Dahls hus, University of Oslo Dates: June 15-18, 2014 Predoctoral PhD workshop: Monday morning, June 16, 2014. Conference website: <http://www.catacconference.org/> NB! June is a busy month for conferences and tourism in Oslo. We strongly urge potentially interested participants to explore the resource lists on the conference website of recommended accommodations and book as early as possible. Notifications of acceptance will be issued sufficiently early (March 14, 2014) so as to allow cost-free reservation cancellation if need be. Important Dates: Submission of papers (short or full), panel proposals: 14 February 2014 Notification of acceptance: 14 March 2014 Final formatted papers (for conference proceedings): 18 April 2014 Background. Our 1998 conference on ³Culture, Technology, and Communication² (CATaC) was among the first devoted to the roles of culturally-variable norms, practices, and communicative preferences in the designs, implementations, and responses to (networked) information and communication technologies. While certainly successful in academic terms (including publications and conference ranking by the Australian Research Council as among the top 20% of conferences in these domains), what became a biennial series has also been marked as a critical but collegial conference culture that provides a unique oasis for participants who share often radically interdisciplinary interests. (AoIR-ists will feel right at home!) Much has changed, of course, since 1998 - including the "mainstreaming" of our signature focus on culture as inextricably interwoven with ICTs. Accordingly, CaTaC'14 will be a transformational conference - one that will explore new, robustly interdisciplinary ways of attending to the intersections of culture, technology, and communication in critical but cordial fashion. We aim to both celebrate the people and accomplishments of the past conference series, and to transform the conference series through development of new research, directions and approaches. We invite both participation in the opening Doctoral Colloquium and paper and panel submissions that address the intersections between culture, technology, and communication with a focus on either Design/Production or Practice (see descriptions below). Doctoral Colloquium: PhD students will present and collaboratively discuss their current work, and enjoy advice and mentoring from senior faculty across the disciplines represented at CaTaC¹14 including informatics and design, communication and media studies, among others (Monday morning, June 16, 8.30-12.00). Conference tracks. We invite research, reflection, and scholarship that specifically address one or more of our defining elements of culture, technology, and communication while simultaneously exploring the interrelationship(s) between these. More particularly, we invite submissions that do so through focusing on either Design/Production or Practice. (For a much more extensive description of the tracks and their threads, please see the conference website.) Design/Production For this track, we invite individual papers and panels that look at how technical, cultural and communication affordances and constraints intersect in the production of technology, messages and theory construction. This track includes: * Designs for Good Lives in a Mediated Age, Invited panel, ³Cross-cultural understandings and designs of social robots as co-agents of good lives² (Satomi Sugiyama, chair). * Trans-mediated and intelligent workplaces: implications for work analysis and interaction design * Technology Design: Politics and ethics * Legal and ethical issues * Research Design and Theory Development Practice We invite individual submissions and panels that have the use of information and communication technologies in specific cultural contexts as their main focus. Examples include: * Cultural diversity and global ICTs, e.g. ,global health information systems, Wikipedia, social media; * Global and local cultures of computing; * The construction of identity using online social media, gaming, and blogging platforms * Political activism through social media * Privacy issues in media environments that encourage public identities. * Analysis of Cultural Discourses about technology that shape understanding and use, Both short (3-5 pages) and long (10-15 pages) original papers are sought for presentation. Panel proposals addressing a specific theme or topic are also encouraged. Papers will be published in the Conference Proceedings (electronic only). Authors retain copyright, etc. Registration fees: to be determined. (We anticipate that registration fees will be somewhat perhaps significantly less than in previous years.) We look forward to welcoming you to Oslo next June! Conference Co-organizers: Charles Ess (Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo) Maja van der Velden (Department of Informatics, University of Oslo) Organizing Committee José Abdelnour-Nocera (School of Computing and Technology, University of West London) Herbert Hrachovec (Philosophy Department, University of Vienna) Leah Macfadyen (Evaluation and Learning Analytics, University of British Columbia) Patrizia Schettino (Communication Studies, Università della Svizzera italiana) Ylva Hård af Segerstad (Department of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg/Chalmers) Andra Siibak (Media Studies, University of Tartu) Michele M. Strano, Program Chair (Communication Studies, Bridgewater College) Satomi Sugiyama (Communication and Media Studies, Franklin College Switzerland)