CALL FOR PAPERS
American Sociological Association Section on Communication and Information Technologies (CITASA)
August 1-4, 2008 Boston, MA
This year\’s section sessions:
1) Community & Technology
2) Communications & Society
3) Sociology of Communications & IT
4) Roundtable Session
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: January 16, 2008
COMMUNITY AND TECHNOLOGY
Organizer: Keith N Hampton, University of Pennsylvania
Description:
Recognizing the diverse definitions of community, this session is open to empirical, theory, and design submissions related to the study of community and new information and communication technologies. Topics may include:
virtual communities, communities of interest, geographic communities, community informatics, distributed communities, inter-organizational communities, learning communities, social networks, and ethnographies and case studies of community.
COMMUNICATIONS AND SOCIETY
Organizer: Keith N Hampton, University of Pennsylvania
Description:
The sociology of communications at a societal or institutional level. The sociology of communications is framed broadly to include the study of mass media, interpersonal communication, entertainment media, broadcast media, mobile media, the Internet, verbal and non-verbal communication, and advertising. Examples of topics include: media institutions, media ownership, globalization, cross-cultural comparisons, learning intuitions, audiences, work, law, and identity.
SOCIOLOGY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND IT
Organizer: Keith N Hampton, University of Pennsylvania
Description:
Open session on any topic related to the study of new information and communication technologies. Quantitative, qualitative, conceptual, critical, and theory contributions are welcome. Topics may include: health, politics, work, relationships, virtual environments, social networks, teaching, software, hardware, the Internet, cell phones, mobile computing, etc.
ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS
Organizer: Lee Humphreys, University of Wisconsin
Description:
Open to all areas within the sociological study of communications and information technologies.
ALL SUBMISSIONS FOR THE 2008 PROGRAM MUST BE MADE VIA THE ASA ONLINE SYSTEM.
Those submitting papers to a regular session are strongly encourage to indicate that they would like their paper forwarded to the Roundtable Session if there is not room for their paper in a regular session. Authors submitting papers to regular section sessions will be will be notified of the acceptance of their paper by February 20. Authors submitting to the section roundtables will be notified by March 14.
IMPORTANT REMINDER
All papers accepted for presentation during a CITASA section session, the CITASA Roundtable Session, the CITASA Pre-Conference and Graduate Student Workshop (to be announced soon!), or any ASA session at the 2008 meeting, are eligible to be included in the 2nd annual CITASA special issue of the journal Information, Communication and Society (iCS).
The annual meeting of the American Sociological Association is little over a month away. This year the meeting is in New York, Aug 11-14. Barry Wellman and I have are editing a special issue of Information, Communication & Society (iCS) that will contain the top papers presented at the annual meeting that touch on issues related to communications, new media, information studies and related topics. This is the first of what will be an annual special issue of iCS published in conjunction with the ASA section on Communication and Information Technologies (a section that I will Chair for the next two years). If you will be at the ASA meetings, you may be interested in a spreadsheet I put together that contains a list of just over 100 papers being presented at the meeting that deal with communication and technology issues. I compiled the list by doing a search of the online program for every media and technology term I could recall. If you are presenting at the ASA and would like to submit your paper for the special issue of iCS, papers are due to me by October 31, 2007, refereeing will be complete by December 31, 2007, final accepted papers will be due to the editors by February 1, 2008, with publication in the summer of 2008.
I published a new paper this month in the journal Field Methods. The article is called \”Simplifying the Personal Network Name Generator: Alternatives to Traditional Multiple and Single Name Generators\” and was co-authored with a student of mine, Alexandra Marin, now assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. This issue of Field Methods is a special issue devoted to challenges in collecting personal network data. Modesty aside, it is a great issue with a number of very important contributions.
Here is the table of contents:
Barry Wellman \”Challenges in Collecting Personal Network Data: The Nature of Personal Network Analysis\”
Bernie Hogan, Juan Antonio Carrasco, and Barry Wellman \”Visualizing Personal Networks: Working with Participant-aided Sociograms\”
Christopher McCarty, José Luis Molina, Claudia Aguilar, and Laura Rota \”A Comparison of Social Network Mapping and Personal Network Visualization\”
Alexandra Marin and Keith N. Hampton \”Simplifying the Personal Network Name Generator: Alternatives to Traditional Multiple and Single Name Generators\”
Yang-chih Fu \”Contact Diaries: Building Archives of Actual and Comprehensive Personal Networks\”
Scott L. Feld, J. Jill Suitor, and Jordana Gartner Hoegh \”Describing Changes in Personal Networks over Time\”
The abstract for Ali\’s and my contribution:
Researchers studying personal networks often collect network data using name generators and name interpreters. We argue that when studying social support, multiple name generators ensure that researchers sample from a multidimensional definition of support. However, because administering multiple name generators is time consuming and strains respondent motivation, researchers often use single name generators. We compared network measures obtained from single generators to measures obtained from a six-item multiple-name generator. Although some single generators provided passable estimates of some measures, no single generator provided reliable estimates across a broad spectrum of network measures. We then evaluated two alternative methods of reducing respondent burden: (1) the MMG, a multiple generator using the two most robust name generators and (2) the MGRI, a six-item name generator with name interpreters administered for a random subset of alters. Both the MMG and the MGRI were more reliable than single generators when measuring size, density, and mean measures of network composition or activity, though some single name generators were more reliable for measures consisting of sums or counts.
A copy of the paper can be downloaded from the publications section of my website.