Interesting Conferences on Communication

* This post (from May 2015) was updated with the newest conferences:

After organizing the "Top Communication Journals" table, I decided to arrange another list… this time: The International conferences that interest me (relevant to my fields of research).

Dear colleagues, for your convenience, I'm publishing it online with all the URLs of the conferences and the upcoming dates & locations.

I hope to update it when needed (new URLs), and you are more than welcome to share additional conferences. Thanks.

#	Conference	Details
1	ICA- International Communication Association Annual Conference	2015: May 21-25, San Juan, Puerto Rico 2016: June 9-13, Fukuoka, Japan 2017: May 25-29, San Diego, California, USA 2018: May 24-28, Prague, Czech Republic 2019: May 23-27, Washington, D.C., USA 2020: May 21-25, Gold Coast, Australia 2021: Denver, Colorado, USA 2022: Paris, France 2023: Toronto, Canada
2	IAMCR- International Association for Media and Communication Research Conference	2015: July 12-16, Montreal, Canada 2016: July 27-31, Leicester, UK 2017: July 16-20, Cartagena, Colombia 2018: June 20-24, Eugene, Oregon, USA 2019: July 7-11, Madrid, Spain 2020: July 12-16, Beijing, China
3	NCA- National Communication Association Annual Convention	2015: November 19-22, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA 2016: November 10-13, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA 2017: November 16-19, Dallas, Texas, USA 2018: November 8-11, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA 2019: November 14-17, Baltimore, Maryland, USA 2020: November 19-22, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA 2021: November 18-21, Seattle, Washington, USA 2022: November 17-20, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA 2023: November 16-19, National Harbor, Maryland, USA
4	AEJMC- Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference	2015: August 6-9, San Francisco, California, USA 2016: August 4-7, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA 2017: August 9-12, Chicago, Illinois, USA 2018: August 6-9, Washington, D.C., USA 2019: August 7-10, Toronto, Canada 2020: August 6-9, San Francisco, California, USA 2021: August 4-7, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA 2022: August 3-6, Detroit, Michigan, USA 2023: August 7-10, Washington, D.C., USA 2024: August 7-10, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
5	AoIR- Association of Internet Researchers	2015: October 21-24, Phoenix, Arizona, USA 2016: October 5-8, Berlin, Germany 2017: October 19-21, Tartu, Estonia 2018: October 10-13, Montreal, Canada 2019: October 2-5, Brisbane, Australia 2020: October 29-31, Dublin, Ireland
6	ECREA- (European Communication Research and Education Association) European Communication Conference	2016: November 9-12, Prague, Czech Republic 2017: March 23-24, Odense, Denmark 2018: October 31- November 3, Lugano, Switzerland 2020: Braga, Portugal
7	ISOJ- International Symposium on Online Journalism	2015: April 17-18 2016: April 15-16 2017: April 21-22 2018: April 13-14 2019: April 12-13 2020: April 24-25 University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA
8	HICSS- Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences	2016: January 5-8, Manoa, Hawai'i 2017: January 4-7, The Big Island, Hawai'i 2018: January 2-6, The Big Island, Hawai'i 2019: January 8-11, Maui, Hawai'i 2020: January 7-10, Maui, Hawai'i 2021: January 5-8, Kauai, Hawai'i
9	ICWSM- The International AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Conference on Weblogs and Social Media	2015: May 26-29, Oxford, UK 2016: May 17-20, Cologne, Germany 2017: August 24-25, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2018: June 25-28, Stanford, California, USA 2019: June 11-14, Munich, Germany 2020: August 24-25, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
10	WWW- International World Wide Web Conference	2015: May 18-22, Florence, Italy 2016: April 11-15, Montreal, Canada 2017: April 3-7, Perth, Australia 2018: April 23-27, Lyon, France 2019: May 13-17, San Francisco, California, USA 2020: N/A, Taiwan, Taiwan 2021: N/A, Ljubljana, Slovenia

SNA- Social Network Analysis

Nowadays, I'm learning SNA (Social Network Analysis) in Coursera with Prof. Lada Adamic (University of Michigan), and it's a fascinating course!

How is it related to my research?

Well, in many ways. For example, Adamic & Glance's important research from 2005: The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog. Or more recent research: Learning Analytics for Learning Blogospheres- Pham, Derntl, Cao & Klamma (2012). 

Here's the first assignment (of the SNA course): My Facebook Network, using Gephi - an exciting open-source network visualization platform.

You can see the 'Giant Component' (and other nodes in my network, which are not connected to the others).

And here you can see the centrality measure of 'betweenness':



LinkedIn created the basic map automatically (LinkedInLabs- InMaps):



For further exploration, I recommend the following items:

Video: Social Network Analysis- The Basics from 'GalaxyAdvisors', with basic vocabulary, professional associations, and interesting references.

Also, for extensive basic info: social network analysis presentation from Guillaume Ereteo.

Video from TED: Nicholas Christakis and his spectacular speech on The hidden influence of social networks. This video summarizes his & James Fowler's book: 'The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives - How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do.'

I think it is a perfect example of the practical use of SNA.

Video from TEDxRiga: Valdis Krebs's dialog about Ending up on the Wrong Side of the Tracks. Additionally, I think this short presentation, by Alexander Semeonov, emphasizes Krebs's point: Social network analysis of hashtag usage during protest meetings.

  

David Easley & Jon Kleinberg placed their SNA Textbook online for free download: Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About A Highly Connected World. I think it's an important book due to its extensive materials and its interdisciplinary approach to understanding networks.

 

That's it for now. For closure, here's a nice guy to follow on Pinterest :-)



I can identify with that...

Unfortunately...

 

 

 

 

:-)

My "Like" Links - Post#1

It's been 10 months (!) since I published my first blog post with the everlasting question: "To blog or not to blog?"… Now I have decided that the answer must be: "To blog"!

When I thought about what I wanted to contribute to the world using this modest platform, I realized that during the day, every day, I read a lot (everything from news articles to academic studies). So, I decided to create a new section of posts called: links with my "Like."

I'll focus more on the news coverage and less on the academic publications in order to maintain a wide variety of topics (unlike the narrow ones that are included in my Ph.D. research). I'm hoping to post a new piece every two weeks or so, collecting the articles I liked the most.
This first post is exceptional because I have accumulated several links in the past months (the links are sorted from the newest to the oldest. HEB = in Hebrew).

Hope you'll like my posts & find some interesting topics to think about :-)

• Six degrees of aggregation: How The Huffington Post ate the Internet. Columbia Journalism Review- Michael Shapiro (May12)

• The Science of civil war: What makes heroic strife- Computer models that can predict the outbreak and spread of civil conflict are being developed. The Economist (21Apr12)

• Behind the scene of the Internet hits: Why is everybody talking about KONY? Calcalist- Omer Kabir (4Apr12)- HEB

• Many Voices, but Still One Times- The tension between individual journalists' social media expressions and their employers' established standards. The New York Times- Arthur S. Brisbane (18Feb12) 

• A Newspaper, and a Legacy, Reordered: The Washington Post Recast for a Digital Future. The New York Times- Jeremy W. Peters (11Feb12) 

• Are Silicon Valley tech bloggers truly objective? Los Angeles Times- Michael Hiltzik (22Feb12) 

• Twitter- Year in review. Especially- Hot topics (Jan12)

• My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats Too. GigaOm- Om Malik (26Nov11)

• Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees. The world is even smaller than you thought. The New York Times- John Markoff (21Nov11)

• Study shows that 50 percent of consumed tweets come from one of 20k influential users. TNW- Sherilynn Macale (3Oct11)

• Audience Analysis of Major News Accounts on Twitter- Comparing @AJEnglish/@BBCNews/@CNN/@TheEconomist/@FoxNews/@NYTimes. SocialFlow- Gilad Lotan, Devin Gaffney, Cherie Meyaer (Aug11)

• Israel: The Start-Up Nation taking on Silicon Valley. The Telegraph- Emma Barnett (21Jul11)  

• Newspaper Extinction Timeline- Further explanation. Trends in the Living Networks- Ross Dawson (18Nov10)

"To Blog or Not to Blog?"

For Years, I have been following blogs on a daily basis, examining the phenomenon with great interest… as expected from someone who researches the field.

The question that I've been asking myself & have been asked by others was: "Why don't you open your own blog?"

My answer always was: "Since I'm a prolific writer and lean to perfectionism and obsessively following the 'beat of the net,' I can do blogging, but then I'll have no life. Instead of dealing with my Ph.D. research, I'll only operate the blog".

And then, I got this task in the framework of the course "Information Technologies": Build yourself a website using HTML. Well, I did it.

For a not so technical person like me, it was a challenge… so I sat down and read explanations on the web and developed, step-by-step, not an impressive design, but it ultimately came out nice and modest. The experience led to my decision: to start a "real" blog.

Here comes the first post… and I'm still struggling with Shakespeare's question:

Shakespeare

Let's wait and see…