Do you need YouTube data for research? Give Tubekit at try! http://www.tubekit.org/ TubeKit is a toolkit for creating YouTube crawlers. It allows one to build one's own crawler that can crawl YouTube based on a set of seed queries and collect up to 17 different attributes. TubeKit assists in all the phases of this process starting database creation to finally giving access to the collected data with browsing and searching interfaces. Call for Papers "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States" April 3 & 4, 2009 - Amherst, Massachusetts http://youtube08election.crowdvine.com/ A two-day conference jointly hosted by: The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) The National Center for Digital Government (NCDG) Keynote Speakers Day 1: Richard Rogers, Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Director of govcom.org. Dr. Rogers 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: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the 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, USA. 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. Approach The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly endorses new and experimental approaches involving collaboration with information and computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to: - citizen initiated campaign videos, - candidates' use of YouTube, - bloggers use of YouTube to influence the primaries or election, - the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the election cycle, - the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or voting behavior, - social network analysis of YouTube and related election-oriented sites, - political theory or communication theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election, - new metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect" on elections, - archives for saving and tools for mapping the full landscape of YouTube election content, - use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral politics, or - reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube. Paper Submissions Authors are invited to prepare and submit to JITP a manuscript following one of the six submission formats by January 7, 2009. These formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes, review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States." How to Submit Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper via the JITP web site is documented at http://www.jitp.net/. Papers will be put through an expedited blind peer review process by the Program Committee and authors will be notified about a decision by February 15, 2009. A small number of papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Other paper authors will be invited to present a poster during the Friday evening reception. All posters must include a "YouTube" version of their research findings. Best Paper and Poster Cash Prizes The author (or authors) of the best research paper will receive a single $1,000 prize. The creator (or creators) of the best YouTube poster/research presentation will also receive a single prize of $1,000. Conference Co-Chairs Stuart Shulman, University of Massachusetts Amherst (mailto:stu@polsci.umass.edu) Michael Xenos, Louisiana State University (mailto:xenos@lsu.edu) Program Committee Sam Abrams, Harvard University Micah Altman, Harvard University Karine Barzilai-Nahon, University of Washington Lance Bennett, University of Washington Ryan Biava, University of Wisconsin Bob Boynton, University of Iowa John Brigham, University of Massachusetts Amherst Tom Carlson, Åbo Akademi University Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway University of London Greg Elmer, Ryerson University Kirsten Foot, University of Washington Jane Fountain, University of Massachusetts Amherst Jeff Guliati, Bentley College Mike Hais, Co-author, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics Matthew Hale, Seton Hall University Justin Holmes, University of Minnesota Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute Mike Margolis, University of Cincinnati Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst John McNutt, University of Delaware Andrew Philpot, University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute Antoinette Pole, Montclair State University Stephen Purpura, Cornell University Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project Jeffrey Seifert, Congressional Research Service Mack Shelley, Iowa State University Charlie Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst Chirag Shah, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill John Wilkerson, University of Washington Christine Williams, Bentley College Morley Winograd, University of Southern California Quan Zhou, University of Wisconsin-Stout -- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Assistant Professor Department of Political Science University of Massachusetts Amherst http://people.umass.edu/stu/ stu@polsci.umass.edu Editor, Journal of Information Technology & Politics http://www.jitp.net Director, QDAP-UMass http://people.umass.edu/stu/QDAP-UMass/ Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/