CALL FOR PAPERS - Extended Deadline! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digital Placemaking Workshop - Augmenting Physical Places with Contextual Social Data At ICWSM - Oxford, UK - 26th May 2015 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This workshop aims to explore intersections between placemaking – typically understood as a community or people-centered approach to the planning, design, social production, and maintenance of public spaces – and social media. As a hands on workshop, the participants will partake in outdoor, collaborative activities focusing on the potential value of combining social media data and other data sources (such as sensors, wearable technologies, personal and collective experiences) in order to augment understandings of place and space and cultivate placemaking efforts and processes among social networks, neighborhoods, communities, artists, municipal governments, planners, and non-profits. People have embraced social media as a means to express their experiences within and knowledge about particular places, and researchers have continued to analyze these digital traces in order to better understand social activities within particular places. Geo-tagged social media data such as photos, tweets, check-ins, audio, video, and status updates have proliferated and reveal individual and collective senses of place and local insights into interactions between people and place (Schwartz, 2014). However, these digital traces alone cannot reveal a holistic sense of place and placemaking. One of the key goals of the workshop is to create a hands on experience and encourage participants from a variety of backgrounds to discover, share, and interact with experimental techniques of data gathering and urban sensing. The Digital Placemaking Workshop fosters discussions covering topics such as (but not limited to): - Use of social media to engage communities in placemaking activities and participatory design - Mobilizing and exhibiting place and placemaking efforts through social media - Improving understandings of place and space through mining social media - Pervasive applications for local user interaction and data collection - Methodological advances in contextual understandings of social media outputs across space & place - Use of social media to inform design and planning practices - Role of social media in expressing or altering a sense of place or aiding in the understanding of the everyday functionalities of regions, spaces and places - Enabling citizen, artist, government, and NGO initiatives through social media - Visualizations and interfaces to enable exploration and sharing of local data and experiences - Privacy and ethical concerns in citizen engagement OBJECTIVES We seek to bring industry professionals, academic researchers, community organizers, architects, artists, municipal officials, and urban planners together in an intellectual and material exploration of timely questions pertaining to social media, big data, and the role they may play in creating or exploring placemaking processes. Participants will have the opportunity to showcase their ongoing and emerging projects; demonstrate and discuss theoretical, methodological, ethical, and political questions in regard to the study of placemaking and social media; and participate in an interactive outdoor data exploration session where participants will collect experiential data about the city of Oxford and collaboratively tackle a specific social media dataset related to the experiential data collected. This workshop aims to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration as well as mutual understandings of the value of employing social media to understand place and space. We invite computer scientists, industry professionals, urban planners, architects, academics, community organizers, government officials, hackers, and artists to apply to this workshop. SUBMISSIONS All contributions must be submitted as PDF files. Submissions will be evaluated by the Organizing Committee. The workshop accepts novel research or work-in-progress papers (no longer than 4 pages) or position papers (no longer than 2 pages). All papers must be submitted by the deadlines provided below and formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the author instructions page). All submitted papers will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation by the Program Committee. All accepted submissions must be presented during the workshop. Please submit papers through EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digitalplacemaking20 IMPORTANT DATES Paper submission deadline: March 31, 2015 Paper acceptance notifications: April 14, 2015 Workshop final camera-ready paper due: April 21, 2015 ICWSM-15 Workshop Day: May 26, 2015 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Dr. Germaine Halegoua, Assistant Professor University of Kansasgrhalegoua@ku.edu Dr. Raz Schwartz, Researcher Facebook Researchraz@fb.com Dr. Ed Manley, Lecturer in Smart Cities Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College Londoned.manley@ucl.ac.uk