We invite research contributions to the Web and Society track at the 32nd edition of The Web Conference series (formerly known as WWW), to be held on April 30 - May 4, 2023, hosted in Austin, Texas, USA (/www2023/).
The Web deeply impacts and co-evolves with societies worldwide. In addition to fostering rapid technological development on sensing, archiving, organizing, communicating, and connecting people within and between societies and social groups, the Web also raises the need to reflect which values societies need to pursue and how to pursue them in an increasingly digitized and diversified world.
We welcome submissions in all areas that concern the interaction of the Web and society. Such interactions may be (but are not limited to) the interaction of the Web with traditional or mainstream media, governments, non-governmental organizations and business, in sectors such as healthcare, science, and education, and in terms of social structures, in/equalities, and social groups.
We also encourage papers concerning interdisciplinary issues in the context of the Web and Web-mediated societies, such as employment, labor, legislation, politics, governance, democracy, economics, and changes in homes, workplaces, schools, and cities. We appreciate a broad range of methodological contributions (from statistical, algorithmic, and systems approaches to qualitative and ethnographic approaches) and novel theoretical, empirical and phenomenological findings.
Note that papers focusing solely on the advancement of algorithmic components, or which use Web data only as an artifact (for instance, in method evaluation) are out of scope of this track, and will be rejected early (“desk rejected”) in the reviewing process.
Health on the Web: The Web and Society track also welcomes research related to health on the Web (which was a special track at the conference in 2021) that brings together advances in Web-related computer science with direct benefits to the medical and health domains. Relevant research includes advances in computer science as applied to health or medicine on the Web, significant advances in health, utilizing existing state-of-the-art computational techniques, and reports on significant lessons learned from real-world deployment of medicine or health-related Web technology. Of particular interest is research showing how the Web can improve individual and public health or provide better healthcare delivery. Submissions related to the COVID-19 pandemic are also welcome.
Submissions should explain clearly how they are related to the interaction between the Web and society. Where appropriate, submissions must indicate how they have addressed the ethical and reproducibility dimensions of their research. We encourage interdisciplinary research approaches involving sociology, psychology, communication and media sciences, political sciences, health science, or others.
Papers that are primarily about fairness, accountability, transparency, or ethics should preferably be submitted to the new “Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics on the Web” track, rather than the “Web and Society” track, but the integration of equality, diversity and inclusion and responsible research issues are welcomed by the “Web and Society” track.
Authors should consult the conference’s main Research Track CFP to ensure their submissions are aligned with broader conference expectations, scope, and theme: “Web Research with Openness, Fairness and Reproducibility”. The CFP also details submission guidelines, relevant dates, and important policies.
Submissions that are out of scope or unresponsive to the call above will be rejected early during the reviewing process (“desk rejected”) with minimal feedback. Note that papers focusing solely on the advancement of algorithmic components, or which use Web data only as an artifact (for instance, in method evaluation) are out of scope of this track.
In case you have doubts whether your paper fits the scope of this track, please contact the track chairs: websoc-thewebconf2023@easychair.org