‘16 ICA Preconference Workshop (Tokyo)

ICA’2016 Preconference Workshop

Mining Social Media for Communication Research

Co-organized by Web Mining Lab, City University of Hong Kong, and National Institute of Informaitics, Japan

Date: June 8, 2016 (one day before ICA’2016 in Fukuoka, Japn)

Venue: National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan

Call for Participants

Aims and Objectives: The emergence of social media has provided both opportunities and challenges for communication research, ranging from data acquisition to measurement construction, statistical analysis, and results presentation. However, the existing tools (such as manual content analysis and SPSS package) with which communication scholars are familiar become increasingly inadequate. As such, there has been an urgent need for in-depth knowledge and hands-on skills of computational methods throughout the field. To serve the need, a one-day workshop will be organized in Tokyo, prior to the 2016 annual conference of International Communication Association (ICA’2016) in Fukuoka, Japan. The workshop will consist of four sessions, each covering a key step in mining social media for communication research, ranging from data collection to text processing, statistical analysis, and data visualization. The workshop will use Twitter as a primary running example of social media. All four sessions will mix conceptual discussions and hands-on practices (using R language as the primary tool). As such, the participants are requested to bring with their notebook computers. Registration Procedure:

Interested participants should submit an application form to Winson Peng (winsonpeng at ntu.edu.sg) before Feb 15, 2016;
Up to 30 participants will be selected from the pool of applicants, based on prior experience with computational methods, and notified by Feb 15, 2016;
Accepted participants are required to pay registration fees at the official ICA’2016 website before March 1, 2016, with US$150 per non-student participant or US$80 per student participant.

Note:

The registration fees will cover refreshment att about US$20 per person.
The participants need to bear all other costs during the workshop, such as transportations, accommodations, and meals.
Cancellation: 50% refund by April 1, 2016; no refund thereafter.