4th International Conference on e-Social Science Manchester, June 18th-20th, 2008 Call for Submissions http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference/ The aim of the conference on e-Social Science is to bring together leading international representatives of the social science, e-Infrastructure/ cyberinfrastructure and e-Research communities in order to improve mutual awareness, harmonize understanding and instigate coordinated activities to accelerate research, development and deployment of powerful, new research methods and tools for the social sciences and beyond. We invite contributions from members of the social science, e-Infrastructure/cyberinfrastructure and e-Research communities with experience of, or interests in: 1) exploring, developing, and applying new methods, practices, and tools afforded by new infrastructure technologies - such as the Grid and Web 2.0 - in order to further social science research; and 2) studying issues impacting on the wider take-up of e-Research. Submission categories include: full and short papers, posters, demos, workshops, tutorials and panels. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: * Case studies of the application of e-Social Science research methods to substantive social science problems * Case studies of (e-)Research and (e-)Social Science research practices, including benefits and challenges of collaboration (both small and large scale) across disciplinary and geographical boundaries * Advances in tools and techniques for quantitative and qualitative e-Social Science, including statistical analysis, simulation, data mining, text mining, social network analysis and collaborative environments * Infrastructure and services for e-Social Science, including data collection, discovery, sharing and integration, standards for metadata, ontologies, annotation, curation * Enabling new sources and forms of sociological data through e-Social Science, including ethical issues and challenges in the collection, integration, sharing and analysis of sociological and other personal data * The e-Research technical roadmap, including grids, web 2.0 and their future (co-)evolution * Socio-technical issues in the development of e-Research, including usability challenges for the design of research tools and middleware, factors influencing the wider adoption and sustainability of e-Infrastructure Submission requirements for full and short papers, posters and demos Authors are requested to submit an abstract of approximately 1000-1500 words. Please indicate the category of your submission: full paper, short paper, poster or demo and include the contact details of the main author on a separate sheet. Demo submissions should include a statement of technical requirements. Submissions will be subject to independent review and a final decision will be made by the conference programme committee. Authors of submissions not accepted as full papers may be invited to submit a short paper or poster instead. Accepted full and short papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Formats for the camera-ready copies of full and short papers, and posters will be available for download from the conference web site in January, 2008. Submission requirements for workshops, tutorials and panels Workshop, tutorial and panel organisers are requested to submit a one page outline of the topic, format, likely audience, special requirements. Deadlines and submission instructions Paper abstracts: February 4th, 2008. Workshop, tutorial and panel outlines: February 22nd, 2008. Poster and demo abstracts: March 21st, 2008. Authors will be informed of the programme committee’s decision in early March, 2008. Submission instructions can be found at http://www.ncess.ac.uk/events/conference/