Six weeks ago, i asked all researchers who were publishing about social network sites to come forward and be counted. I mentioned that Nicole Ellison and i were plotting… Now i’m back to reveal what we are up to. We used that list to show that there was enough research going on in this space from a bazillion different disciplinary and methodological directions to justify a special edition of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. For those who don’t know JCMC, it’s a kick-ass interdisciplinary journal (with a saint as an editor). They’re dedicated to being accessible. The articles published are meant for a broad audience and they make all of their issues online for EVERYONE to read.
So, anyhow, we approached JCMC with our plot… we wanted to excite the journal into letting us put together a special issue on social network sites. And guess what? It’s gonna happen!
I’m here to announce a Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of JCMC on “Social Network Sites: People, Practice, and Culture.” 500 word abstracts will be due 28 November 2006. Full papers will be due 28 February 2007. Read the Call for full details about the scope of this issue and the procedure to submit. Feel free to ask questions as well. We welcome previously unpublished research articles and they will be peer-reviewed. We welcome all theoretical and methodological approaches. Also, based on the confusion in my previous post, we added the following definitional clause: “While all social network sites allow participants to create a profile and publicly articulate their social connections within the system, the line between social network sites and dating sites, MMOGs, media sharing sites, blogging tools, and other social community sites can be blurry. Rather than enforcing a strict definition of what constitutes a social network site, we ask authors to explain how their site of study fits into a rubric of social network sites.”
Anyhow, i’m uber uber excited about this so i hope that you pass it along to everyone you know doing research in this area. Also, while we’re on the topic, Nicole and i will most likely be hosting a workshop on social network sites at the Communities and Technologies Conference next summer. These are topically connected but participation in one does not require participation in the other. More on this shortly.
::BOUNCE::BOUNCE::
just pointing out a typo.
“500 word abstracts will be due 28 November 2006. Full papers will be due 28 February 2006.”
Sounds very interesting btw.
“… full papers will be due … 2007 …” me thinks!?
😉
Thx for pointing us to the web site.
Funny that a journal with such a name (and such content) should have such a traditional web site. Perhaps you can also suggest to them to post the abstracts of their articles in a blog like interface, so readers can subscribe and know when a new issue is out, and so they can comment, interact, and communicate with the content, in a computer-mediated way 🙂
If you’re volunteering, i’m sure they’d be glad to let you fix up the site!