Here’s the call for papers for the STS conference “The Webvideo in Science Communication: Issues and Trends” from May 8–9 in Graz, Austria:
After an exponential growth in users as well as producers, webvideos have become one of the standards in the way online communication takes place. Webvideos are increasingly preferred over text and image-based sources. In the case of science communication, this brings about new issues, as for example quality aspects, that need to be addressed from an STS perspective. In addition, it directly affects the relationships between science and society, replacing traditional interfaces and loosening the control of the scientific community over content and sources in a way that could undermine the trust that has been so hard to restore in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In this session we are particularly interested in contributions that address these issues, analyse trends and discuss if and how science communication needs to be reconceptualised in the age of YouTube, Vimeo etc. Therefore, we welcome contributions addressing questions regarding the production and reception processes of science webvideos, the actors and their role as both science communicators and webvideo producers, rules of communication on online video-platforms as well as content that is communicated. How is the concept of quality to be addressed in the context of webvideos?
We are also interested in the impact of webvideos on intra-scientific communication, i.e. if and how webvideos affect science and research communication.
Finally, we also would like to explore how characteristics of science communication via webvideos influences other ways of science communication generally.
We welcome theoretical, conceptual and empirical contributions from various disciplinary and cultural backgrounds as well as perspectives from webvideo practitioners in order to get a multifaceted picture of the webvideo in science communication.
Deadline: January 30, 2017. For submitting your abstract, please use the online form on the conference website.
Organizers: Andrea Geipel, Technical University of Munich, and Erik Stengler, University of the West of England