[WebCultures] Social Media + Society Special Issue: Semantic Media

[Heather Ford]

*Call for Papers*



*Social Media + Society** Special Issue: Semantic Media*



*Editors: Andrew Iliadis and Heather Ford*



This special issue focuses on “semantic media,” which we define as media
technologies that primarily orchestrate and convey facts, answers,
meanings, and “knowledge” about things directly in media products, rather
than lead people to other sources. Search engines and virtual assistants
respond directly to questions based on textual or verbal searches (e.g.,
“Things to do in Philadelphia?” or “What is the capital of Israel?”). The
special issue is thus dedicated to the often-invisible ways (to the
non-specialist) that internet companies are now actively involved in
constructing “knowledge” about the world. Organizations like Apple, Google,
Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon extract, curate, and store facts served to
users in new and emerging media products. Such processes have significant
implications for the politics of knowledge sharing in the future.



We seek papers that examine how design decisions “bake” these facts into
the apps and platforms people use daily while focusing on the
infrastructures dedicated to orchestrating and presenting this information.
The goal is to understand the technologies that will drive social and
political outcomes when large internet companies become a primary conduit
through which people directly acquire an understanding of facts about the
world. We also seek to understand how governments, nonprofit, and
nongovernmental organizations engage these media technologies. Semantic
media are less about searching for keywords and matches on different
websites that are then ranked for people to choose. Instead, they deal with
identifying and describing entities (things like people, products, and
places) and directing interactions with those entities (actions like
purchasing, scheduling, and contacting). How do semantic media identify
concepts and connect related information about them? How do companies and
organizations produce facts and organize the data? From where does the data
originate? What do these semantic processes mean for web users and
administrators? What types of gatekeeping or safety checks do companies and
organizations perform concerning these facts?



Today’s semantic media have a long history reaching back to the “Semantic
Web” project initiated by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Yet, media
researchers do not adequately cover how companies and organizations
implement semantic technologies on platforms relative to their central
role. These semantic technologies are in proprietary and open source
products, and extensive media platforms are now using them to provide facts
and represent knowledge to various publics. Google’s Knowledge Graph is a
database of facts that Google uses to provide quick answers to the public,
and such graphs are in use at other companies. At the same time, Wikipedia
has a product called Wikidata that similarly stores facts about the world
in data formats through which various apps can retrieve the data.
Researchers and journalists also use semantic technologies for search
engine optimization, fact-checking practices, and data sharing and
organization. This special issue thus focuses on such platformized versions
of fact production and examines the underlying infrastructures, histories,
and modeling techniques used in knowledge representation systems.



We are interested in quantitative, qualitative, and critical approaches and
papers that propose new methods, theories, and frameworks.



*Areas of interest:*



•           The creation or transmission of facts, answers, meanings,
definitions, and “knowledge” across media systems and their platforms

•           Answers from virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana,
Bixby, etc.

•           Answers from search engines such as Google, Bing, Baidu,
Yandex, etc.

•           Products like knowledge panels, infoboxes, carousels, rich
results, maps, etc.

•           Open-source semantic technologies such as Schema.org, Wikidata,
etc.

•           Proprietary semantic technologies such as Google’s Knowledge
Graph, etc.

•           Fact-checking practices for misinformation and disinformation
across semantic media platforms

•           Search engine optimization and semantic search practices

•           Semantic infrastructure projects such as the semantic web,
linked data, etc.

•           Semantic governance organizations such as the World Wide Web
Consortium, etc.

•           Semantic technologies such as metadata, markup languages,
knowledge bases, knowledge graphs, web schemas, applied ontologies, and
enterprise semantic software

•           Semantic, linguistic, and conceptual theories involving rules
and logic, theories of meaning, ontology, taxonomy, ideas of truth, social
ontology, etc.



*Timeline:*



•           Extended 1000-word abstracts due Fri July 15

•           Decisions out to authors Fri Aug 19

•           Full 8000-word manuscript due Fri Nov 18

•           Final decisions January 2023

•           Submit to journal February 2023

•           Publication spring 2023



*Send submissions to andrew.iliadis at temple.edu <andrew.iliadis at temple.edu>
and heather.ford at uts.edu.au <heather.ford at uts.edu.au> with the subject
header “Social Media + Society Special Issue: Semantic Media”*



*Link: *https://journals.sagepub.com/page/sms/collections/cfp

---------------------------

Dr Heather Ford
Associate Professor and Head of Discipline (Digital and Social Media
<https://www.uts.edu.au/future-students/communication/digital-and-social-media>
)
School of Communication
<https://www.uts.edu.au/future-students/communication/about-communication/welcome-school-communication>,
University of Technology, Sydney <https://www.uts.edu.au/> (UTS)

w: hblog.org / t: @hfordsa <http://www.twitter.com/hfordsa>
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