I am helping to organise an Open Panel at 4S Sydney, August 29 - September 1 2018 (https://4s2018sydney.org/) around "Cultures of Fact Travel". Hoping that there will be some Wikipedia/WikiData/citizen science scholars in Sydney. If you're looking at production/evaluation/distribution of factual knowledge in digitally-mediated environments, please apply! Abstracts close: Feb 1st, 2018.
79. Cultures of fact travel
Organisers: Dr Heather Ford, University of New South Wales; Professor Christopher W. Anderson (University of Leeds), Dr Lucas Graves (University of Oxford)
This panel invites research that addresses how facts and knowledge claims are represented in online spaces, how they are evaluated and verified, the ways in which they face opposition or reach consensus, and/or how they travel through the infrastructures of the Internet. A large variety of sites and practices have emerged to host and distribute facts in online environments. New facts are born digital in the form of databases, data visualisations, online dictionaries and encyclopaedic entries while facts that existed before the Internet are digitised and encoded using the rules and grammar of software. In this environment, facts are produced and represented using software for visualising data and exporting visualisations into Web-friendly formats, where facts are verified on fact checking platforms and where facts are distributed and shared using software such as the ‘share this’ button at the end of a newspaper article, a ‘cite this’ button on a scientific journal article, or a retweet function on Twitter. In order for a fact to travel, it needs to move from beyond its origins in the lab, the institution, company, field, or community to new audiences. Sometimes this translation happens between institutions, sometimes it happens between fields, or between countries, continents or languages. This panel will host different approaches to the production, evaluation, and distribution of facts in digitally-mediated environments.
Open panel paper submissions should be in the form of abstracts of up to 250 words. They should include the paper’s main arguments, methods, and contributions to STS.
When submitting papers to open panels on the abstract submission platform, you will select the Open Panel you are submitting to. Papers submitted to an open session will be reviewed by the open session organizers and will be given first consideration for that session. Papers not included in the session to which they were submitted will be considered for other sessions.