Please join us at the 1st Annual Journal of Information Technology & Politics Conference, "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States," taking place April 16 & 17, 2009 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This conference brings together social and computer scientists to examine the electoral impact of user-created YouTube content and to demonstrate new technical and analytic opportunities associated with new media technologies and politics. Register on or before January 31 and receive an Early Bird discount. http://www.umass.edu/polsci/youtube/ The conference is pleased to feature two keynote speakers: Day 1: Richard Rogers, Chair in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). Current research interests include Internet censorship, googlization, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the Web, as well as the post-demographics implied by recommender systems. Day 2: 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, 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. YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle is co-sponsored by the Departments of Political Science, Computer Science and Communication at UMass Amherst; the Center for Public Policy and Administration at UMass Amherst; 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 at UMass Amherst and is supported by a grant from the Research Leadership in Action Program in the Office of Research and Engagement at UMass Amherst. Visit the conference website for more information: http://www.umass.edu/polsci/youtube/ Regards, Michelle Michelle Sagan Goncalves Conference Coordinator YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the US 126 Thompson Hall UMass Amherst Amherst, MA 01003 Telephone: + 1 413 577 2354