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Call for Papers Journal of Universal Computer Science(J.UCS) Special Issue on Analyzing the Political Discourse on Online Social Networks

http://www.jucs.org/ujs/jucs/info/special_issues/JUCS_Analyzing_Political_Discourse_2017_CfP.pdf

Thomson Reuters JCR Impact Factor: 0.466

Guest Editors:

Aitor Almeida, DeustoTech, University of Deusto (aitor.almeida@deusto.es)

Pablo Orduña, DeustoTech, University of Deusto (pablo.orduna@deusto.es)

Online Social Networks (OSN) have become a central point of the Internet. Hundreds of millions of users interact daily on the OSNs, producing and consuming large amounts of user generated data.The importance of the OSNs in the political discourse was promptly recognized during the 2008 USA’s presidential campaign, where the usage of the digital communication channels by the democrats was one of the differential characteristics. Since them, OSNs have been recognized as an important channel to reach the target group and as a source of a trove of user generated information.

Social networks present specific problems and issues during the data analysis process. These issues raise both from the demographic distribution of the users of the OSNs, the difference in the online political discourse and the unique technical characteristics of each network. Traditional techniques have to be adapted to tackle these unique issues of the OSNs, like the limited message length, the existence of malicious users or the demographic bias of the population; in order to take advantage of the real-time and large scale data available to be analyzed.

The purpose of this special issue is to collect innovative and high-quality research contributions regarding both the use of OSNs as a channel for the political discourse and campaigns and the usefulness of the user generated data to assess and predict the political context. This special issue aims also to explore applications and case studies that analyze the usage of Online Social Networks in political campaigns.

Specifically, we seek original contributions on the following topics:

• Analysis of electoral campaigns on social networks.
• Political opinion mining on social networks.
• Prediction of electoral results using social network data.
• SNA techniques for the analysis of the political activity in social networks.
• Influence measurement on social networks.
• Sockpuppets and online astroturfing on political campaigns.
• Issues on using social data for the political discourse analysis.
• Applications and case-studies.

Submission

Author should submit their papers via e-mail to: aitor.almeida@deusto.es and pablo.orduna@deusto.es. The subject of the e-mail should be: [JUCS – Political Social Networks]. Submissions will be reviewed by at least 3 reviewers following a double-blind review process.

All submissions must be written in English and follow the JUCS’s special issues guidelines: http://www.jucs.org/ujs/jucs/info/submissions/style_guide.html. The length of the manuscript may not exceed 20 pages.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: July 15, 2016
• First notification of acceptance/rejection: October 15, 2016
• Revised manuscripts submission deadline: December 15, 2016
• Final notification: January 15, 2017
• Expected Publication Date: March 2017