Special issue on "The Power of Prediction with Social Media"

Special issue call for papers from Internet Research, ISSN: 1066-2243
Editor in Chief: Jim Jansen
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/intr.htm


Overview

Social media today provide an impressive amount of data about users and 
their societal interac-
tions, thereby offering computer scientists, social scientists, 
economists, and statisticians many new
opportunities for research exploration. Arguably one of the most 
interesting lines of work is that
of forecasting future events and developments based on social media 
data, as we have recently seen
in the areas of politics, nance, entertainment, market demands, health, 
etc.

But what can successfully be predicted and why? Since the rst 
algorithms and techniques
emerged rather recently, little is known about their overall potential, 
limitations and general appli-
cability to different domains.

Better understanding the predictive power and limitations of social 
media is therefore of utmost
importance, in order to, for example, avoid false expectations, 
misinformation or unintended con-
sequences. Today, current methods and techniques are far from being well 
understood, and it is
mostly unclear to what extent or under what conditions the different 
methods for prediction can be
applied to social media. While there exists a respectable and growing 
amount of literature in this
area, current work is fragmented, characterized by a lack of common 
evaluation approaches. Yet,
this research seems to have reached a sucient level of interest and 
relevance to justify a dedicated
special issue.

This special issue aims to shape a vision of important questions to be 
addressed in this eld
and ll the gaps in current research by soliciting presentations of 
early research on algorithms,
techniques, methods and empirical studies aimed at the prediction of 
future or present events based
on user generated content in social media.


Topics

To address this guiding theme the special issue will be articulated 
around, but not limited to, the
following topics:

1. Politics, branding, and public opinion mining (e.g., electoral, 
market or stock market prediction).
2. Health, mood, and threats (e.g., epidemic outbreaks, social movements).
3. Methodological aspects (e.g., data collection, data sampling, privacy 
and data de-identication).
4. Success and failure case studies (e.g., reproducibility of previous 
research or selection of base-lines).


Schedule

- Manuscript due date: June 1, 2012
- Decisions due: August 1, 2012
- Revised paper due: September 15, 2012
- Notication of acceptance: October 1, 2012
- Submission of nal manuscript: October 31, 2012
- Publication date: late 2012 / early 2013 (tentative)


Submission

All submitted manuscripts should be original contributions and not be 
under consideration in any
other venue.

Publication of an enhanced version of a previously published conference 
paper is possible if
the review process determines that the revision contains signicant 
enhancements, amplication or
clarication of the original material. Any prior appearance of a 
substantial amount of a submission
should be noted in the submission letter and on the title page.

Submissions must adhere to the Author Guidelines available at:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=intr 

Detailed instructions will be announced later this year.


Guest editors

- Daniel Gayo-Avello, University of Oviedo (Spain), [log in to unmask]
- Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, Wellesley College and Harvard University 
(USA), [log in to unmask]
- Eni Mustafaraj, Wellesley College (USA), [log in to unmask]
- Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology (Austria), 
[log in to unmask]
- Harald Schoen, University of Bamberg (Germany), 
[log in to unmask]
- Peter Gloor, MIT (USA), [log in to unmask]

Feel free to contact the guest editors if you have any question.

-- 

Prof. Dr. Harald Schoen
Professor of Political Sociology
University of Bamberg
Feldkirchenstrasse 21
D-96045 Bamberg
Phone: +49-951-863-2738
[log in to unmask]
http://www.uni-bamberg.de/polsoz