International conference on ICT enhanced SSH

Call for papers

SUBMISSION IS NOW CLOSED!!!

SSH researchers should be awakened to the huge possibilities and avenues for research based on ICT. The future of science is about multidisciplinary collaboration and applying new technologies. ICT tools for SSH researchers already exist, such as research-oriented social networking sites and tools to support scientific research, to manage labs and data, and to enable better communication. These tools could change the way SSH researchers carry out research, collaborate, disseminate and evaluate research outputs. The International Conference on Information-communication technologies enhanced Social Sciences and Humanities (ICTeSSH) is a three day annual conference where stakeholders come together for an open discussion to talk about the changing research ecosystem in SSH fields in the digital age due to the extremely fast development of ICT.

The ICTeSSH 2021 conference (https://ictessh.uns.ac.rs/) aims to bring together leading SSH researchers, computer scientists, informaticians, publishers, librarians, vendors of research ICT tools, SSH decision makers and others, to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of ICT enhanced Social Sciences and Humanities. In addition, the conference aims to discuss promising new ideas and identify new potential collaborators. The ICTeSSH 2021 conference will be held as an online conference in the last week of June. 

Important Dates

  • Dates of the conference: June 28th – 30th, 2021
  • Deadline for extended abstract submission: December 1st, 2020 December 10th, 2020
  • Notification of acceptance: January 31st, 2021
  • Deadline for the full paper submission: May 1st, 2021
  • Deadline for workshop/training proposal submission: January 15th, 2021
  • Registration: May 31st, 2021

Key Facts about the Conference

  • Amazing plenary speakers;
  • Open-access conference proceedings
  • Academic ICT products and infrastructure projects will be presented
  • An award and 1,000 euros prize will be granted to the best conference paper presenter

Submission Guidelines

We welcome submissions related to the themes listed below, however the conference Programme Committee will also consider submissions on any other aspect of ICT enhanced SSH. We are looking for three types of contribution: presentations on academic ICT tools or infrastructure projects, technical papers and research papers. The language of the conference will be English.

The initial submissions must be made by using the EasyChair platform (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ictessh2021), in the form of an extended abstract.

Submit an extended abstract

Please, note the difference between abstract and requested extended abstract. An extended abstract is not simply a long abstract, it is a short research paper whose ideas and significance can be understood in less than an hour. The evaluation of the extended abstracts will be double-blind, therefore authors’ names, addresses, emails and affiliations MUST NOT be included in the extended abstract (in the file). There is no template for the abstract, but the extended abstract MUST be submitted in PDF format and MUST NOT exceed four A4 pages (including figures) and MUST NOT exceed 1500 words. 

The deadline for submitting extended abstracts is 1st December 2020.

Presenters will be notified of acceptance by 31st January 2021.

Accepted extended abstracts will be made available through the conference website. For all accepted papers and posters we will need a short biographical note for the website and a photograph. At least one author or co-author for each accepted abstract MUST be registered for the ICTeSSH conference no later than 15th March 2021. Authors who have not registered by this date will have their paper removed from the programme.

List of Themes

The ICTeSSH Programme Committee proposes to explore each of the following themes through the programme, however it is also open to considering proposals that may not strictly seem to fit into any of the five proposed themes:

Performing research – There are a lot of tools which can help SSH researchers to perform research. This theme includes, but is not limited to, the following sub-themes:

  • ICT based methodologies and algorithms for SSH research
  • eScience
    • HPC, GPU, simulation techniques, computationally-intensive data analysis 
  • Web Science
  • Digital infrastructures for SSH
    • for doing research, writing, reviewing, publishing and assessing research, as well as for outsourcing experiments 
  • Data tools
    • data visualization tools, survey and statistic tools, computation of data, big data, machine learning, deep learning techniques, etc.
  • Citizen science / people-powered research
  • Exploring literature
    • Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Zotero, Reference managers, automatic recommendation system, automatic literature review, Article visualization tools – these enhance your reading experience, for instance, by helping you navigate from one paper to another
  • The Internet of things
    • connecting instrumentation to the Internet
  • Software source code tools
    • to help the development of research software

Collaboration – Research cannot stay buried in the lab any more, and researchers all over the world should collaborate. Science is an increasingly collaborative endeavour because research problems tackled by today’s SSH researchers require a variety of expertise, skills and scientific equipment. There is a set of ICT tools that help researchers reach out to other researchers and find expertise for new collaborations. This theme includes, but is not limited to, the following sub-themes:

  • Research-orientated social networks / social networks
  • Tools for finding potential collaborators
  • Virtual research environments
  • Bibliometric analysis of publication and collaboration patterns in the digital age
  • Collaborative writing of textual documents
  • Collaborative development of data 
  • Collaborative development of source code
  • Telecoms and meetings
  • Communication tools
  • Infrastructure for research communication

Dissemination – Some ICT tools help SSH researchers to communicate their research outputs to the general public. Managing large sets of data and programming code is already unavoidable for most researchers. Tools have been developed to efficiently store and share data, code, publications and other research objects. This theme includes, but is not limited to, the following sub-themes:

  • Find and share data
    • tools which help researchers to disseminate and find data and samples
  • Data, publication and software source code repositories 
  • Open science and open data
  • FAIR principles
  • Experiment and study protocol repositories
  • Research object / multimedia repositories
  • Research-orientated social networks
  • Web search engines and research objects
  • Selection of journal for publishing papers
    • Journal finder, publisher copyright and self-archiving policies
  • Executable papers

Management – ICT could make management tasks much easier. Also, there are some new options for funding and evaluation of project proposals and results. This theme includes, but is not limited to, the following sub-themes: 

  • Laboratory and project management
  • Electronic laboratory notebooks
  • Crowdfunding
    • tools that help you collect funds for research from others
  • Evaluation of research
    • peer-review, altmetrics, national bibliographic databases, publication forums, etc. 
  • CRIS systems, institutional repositories, bibliographic databases, citation databases
  • Scientometrics/bibliometrics analysis of SSH field based on various citation databases

Skills – There is so much for everyone to learn about how to use ICT to enhance SSH research. Senior researchers should ‘unlearn’ habits from the past and embrace academic culture change. SSH researchers should acquire the right skills in scholarly communications and keep these up to date. This theme includes, but is not limited to, the following sub-themes:

  • Data & software carpentry
  • Integration of various ICT tools
  • Library services for supporting the digital SSH

Publication

The authors with accepted submissions will be invited to submit full papers for publishing in the ICTeSSH 2021 open-access proceedings. The invitation will contain a template and all other important information. The deadline for submission of full papers will be May 1st, 2021.

Keynote Speakers

  • Prof. Dr. Adrian Furnham was educated at the London School of Economics where he obtained a distinction in an MSc Econ., and at Oxford University where he completed a doctorate (D.Phil) in 1981. He has subsequently earned a D.Sc (1991) and D.Litt (1995) degree. Previously a lecturer in Psychology at Pembroke College, Oxford, he was Professor of Psychology at University College London from 1992 to 2018 He has lectured widely abroad and held scholarships and visiting professorships at, amongst others, the University of New South Wales, the University of the West Indies, the University of Hong Kong and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Management at Henley Management College. He has also been made Adjunct Professor of Management at the Norwegian School of Management (2009) and Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (2014). He is currently the Principal Psychologist at Stamford Associates.

    He consults to many organisations in various different sectors (particularly airlines, banks, civil service) and in many different countries (particularly continental Europe and Asia). He is also an experience conference speaker doing around a dozen key-note speeches a year all around the world

    He has written over 1300 scientific papers and 85 books. He is on the editorial board of a number of international journals, as well as the past elected President of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences. He is also a founder director of Applied Behavioural Research Associates (ABRA), a psychological consultancy established over 30 years ago.

Title: New Techniques of Assessment and Selection at Work

Abstract:

This paper reviews various new approaches to assessing personality. These were divided into five areas: Big data; Wearable technology, Gamification, Video-Resumes and Automated Personality Testing. These were briefly described and the evidence for their psychometric properties considered. At this stage there is more absence of evidence, than evidence of absence, for their validity. There is limited research on these methods which may offer new and improved ways of assessing personality

Google Scholar: link

  • Prof. Dr. Carole Goble is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK where leads a team of Researchers, Research Software Engineers and Data Stewards. She has spent 25 years working in e-Science on computational workflows, reproducible science, open sharing, and knowledge and metadata management in a range of disciplines. She has led numerous e-Infrastructure projects including: Taverna, one of the first open source computational workflow management systems and myExperiment.org, the first system agnostic web-based sharing platform for workflows and their related data. She was the scientific lead of the WF4ever project which pioneered the notion of workflows as preservable and reproducible Research Objects. She currently co-leads the WorkflowHub.eu registry for workflows, the RO-Crate community initiative for packaging, exchanging and publishing workflows as Research Objects and serves on the Advisory Board of the Common Workflow Language. These are key components of the EOSC-Life Cluster Workflow Collaboratory (made up of 13 European Research Infrastructures in Biomedical Science) and a resource of the EU COVID data portal. The tools of the Collaboratory are used by other projects from natural history collection digitisation to climate change modelling. Carole also leads the pan-institutional FAIRDOM Consortium which manages FAIR data for systems biology and biomedical projects and directs the digital infrastructure for the IBISBA Research Infrastructure for Industrial Biotechnology. She co-leads the interoperability platform for ELIXIR, the EU Research Infrastructure for Life Sciences and is Head of Node of ELIXIR-UK. Carole is a co-founder of the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute and cares about quality research software and reproducibility by building platforms people actually use with teams of people distributed across projects, institutions and countries.

Title: FAIR Computational Workflows: the what, why, how and who

Abstract: 

In data intensive science multi-step tool-chains are widely used to help scientists manage, analyze, and share increasing volumes of complex data. The use of computational workflows to manage these multi-step computational processes has accelerated in the past few years driven by the need for scalable data processing, the exchange of processing know-how, and the desire for more reproducible (or at least transparent) and quality assured processing methods. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has significantly highlighted the value of workflows.

This increased interest in workflows has been matched by the number of workflow management systems available to scientists (over 280) and the number of workflow services like registries and monitors. There is also recognition that workflows are first class, publishable Research Objects just as data are. They deserve their own FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and services that cater for their dual roles as explicit method description and software method execution.

But what is a workflow? How are they used? Where can I find workflows? How do I publish them? What is a “FAIR” workflow? What are the current challenges? Who are these workflow designers and where can I find one?

This keynote has two main themes. The first is to show what, why and how workflows are used, and what “FAIR” workflows might be, mainly drawing from the worlds of Life Science and Biodiversity but hopefully showing how the Social Science and Humanities community can benefit. The second is to explore the “who” – the social aspects of workflows as shared and sometimes co-developed method and how standards, workflow management systems and in particular the WorkflowHub.eu registry have been built and operate as open, community driven activities.

Google Scholar: link

  • Prof. Dr. Chaomei Chen is a Professor of Information Science in the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University in the USA. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Information Visualization (1473-8716; 1473-8724) and the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (2504-0537). He is the author of a series of books on visualizing the evolution of scientific knowledge as wells strategies and techniques for critical thinking, creativity, and discovery, including Representing Scientific Knowledge: The Role of Uncertainty (Springer 2017), The Fitness of Information: Quantitative Assessments of Critical Information (Wiley, 2014), Turning Points: The Nature of Creativity (Springer, 2011), Information Visualization: Beyond the Horizon (Springer 2004, 2006), Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization (Springer 2003, 2013). He is the creator of the widely used visual analytics software CiteSpace for visualizing and analyzing structural and temporal patterns in scientific literature.

Title: Delineating the Scholarly Landscape of a Research Field

Abstract:

Understanding the development of a research field is challenging but critical for a wide variety of professions and stakeholders. While one may find philosophical, sociological, historical accounts of the evolution of a field of research and interdisciplinary dynamics, delineating and communicating the state of the art of a research field remains to be one of the major bottlenecks in problem-solving and decision-making processes. In this talk, I will introduce how relevant theories from social sciences can be utilized in the design and application of an interactive visual analytic tool, CiteSpace, for computational and explanatory studies of research. I will demonstrate the theoretical and practical values of the types of visual analytic processes by presenting the findings of a few exemplar case studies.

Google Scholar: link

  • Prof. Dr. Adeyinka Tella is an Associate Professor at the Department of Library and Information Science at the University of Ilorin in Nigeria and is currently a visiting researcher in the Department of Information Science at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, South Africa. Before this time, Tella has been a Research Fellow in this same Department of Information Science at UNISA. Tella enrolled for a Ph.D. program through Commonwealth Scholarship in Oct 2005 at the University of Botswana and finished in Sept 2009. Tella is a Three times winner of Dr. TM Salishu Most Published Librarian Award by the Nigerian Library Association (2015, 2017, and 2018), and, a 2007 winner of Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, CODESRIA small grant for thesis writing for the Ph.D. students’ category. Tella has authored over 200 publications including articles in high-impact Web of Science/Scopus, and Scimago rated journals (SRJ), books, and chapter in books.

Title: Technological advancement and transformation of libraries: a glimpse into African context

Abstract:

It is no longer news that advancement in technology has changed and is still changing the library landscape across the globe. Today, advanced technologies especially those ushered in by the Fourth Industrial Revolution such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotic technology, cloud computing, big data, internet of things, IoT, virtual and augmented reality, and others have all changed the way libraries operate. Traditional library tasks such as cataloging, circulation, and collection development, which were performed manually a few decades ago, have now been automated to a greater extent. The way user services are being rendered has also changed compared to what obtained in the past.  These changes seem to be more pronounced in developed nations such as the US, UK, Australia, and some other countries in Europe. In those nations, the changes seem to be prominent, well pronounced, and adequately communicated in form of research reports.  However, much of the transformation taking place in Africa librarianship seem not to be well known and communicated to the outside world. Examining the transformation taking place in the African Library landscape brought by advanced technology is considered to be of interest to the outside world.   In light of this, this presentation seeks to take a glimpse into what is happening in African librarianship by way of examining the changes that have taken place, the changes that are currently taking place, and then project into the likelihood of the changes that will occur in the future. The presentation will discuss the technology that libraries in Africa have used in the past, the ones currently being used, and the ones that will dominate the scene in times to come. The presentation will also delve into the past by looking at the way library services were rendered, the technologies used, and compare to the present to be able to project into the future.  Based on the findings of the study, recommendations will be made on how libraries in African can adequately compete and match up with their counterpart in the developed nations.

Google Scholar: link

Venue

The conference will be held as a virtual meeting due to the COVID19 pandemic.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to ictessh@uns.ac.rs. 

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