*Extended Deadline*

A one-day workshop co-located with CHI'16, 7 May 2016, San Jose, CA, USA

This workshop brings together the diverse community of computational social science and web science researchers who work across platforms and with mixed methods. This is a foundational meeting for the establishment of a unified vision and structured approach for multi-modal and mixed method social media research. We specifically want to address the following points:
• How can a complete social media path be mapped, and what does a complete representation look like?
This overarching question looks for framing and conceptual modelling of complete use pathways. Especially the qualitative aspects of user motivation and needs, and the quantitative aspect of instantiation design are captured here.
• Is the value of a complete path higher than the amount of personal data required to map it with respect to data privacy?
• What are the ethical parameters of path mapping to avoid exploitative conduct?
Necessary to note is that ethical data curation follows the Belmont Principles and/or the guidelines of the Association of Internet researchers [17]. The study design and curation must be reasonable, non-exploitative, and balance data extraction with benefit to society. These questions address the broad ethical issues in internet and cross-platform research.
• What technical affordances need to be implemented to develop a single framework?
Few instantiations exist that support cross-platform data extraction. Even fewer exist that support mixed-method analyses. This question looks for contributions on integrated and automated cross-platform and mixed-method analyses.
• What challenges to holistic curation exist?
It is expected that the observation lenses across platforms and with the differing methods capture differing structural, content, and temporal aspects. As such, the data must be reconciled to support a holistic analysis. Theoretical and empirical contributions addressing these challenges are envisioned with this question.

Call for Participation
Social media and the resulting tidal wave of available data have changed the ways and methods researchers analyze communities at scale. But the full potential for science is not yet achieved. Despite the popularity of social media analysis in the past decade, few researchers invest in cross-platform analyses due to various reasons, e.g. unknown methods and tools, supposed difficult analysis and others.

“Following user pathways: Using cross platform and mixed methods analysis in social media studies” co-located with CHI 2016 brings together a community of researchers and professionals to address methodological, analytical, conceptual, and technological challenges and opportunities of mapping user across platforms with mixed method analysis in social media ecosystems.

Topics of Interest:
• Motivational analysis across different Social Media platforms
• Multi-dimensional Representations of Person, Event and Society on Social Media
• Discrepancies in Representation of Events Across Platforms
• Barriers to Multi-platform and Mixed Methods analysis
• Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications, especially privacy issues
• Technical and Implementation Aspects of Multi-platform analysis
• Experiences of interdisciplinary multi-platform projects
• Mixed-method Approaches to Social Media Path Mapping
• Addressing Bias in Social Media Studies

Submission:
Interested authors should submit a 3-5 page paper in the CHI extended abstract format to hall@kit.edu. The organizing committee will review submissions and select based on relevance, quality, and diversity of inputs. Selected workshop papers will be invited to submit their work for a special issue of Interacting with Computers or another journal. At least one author of each accepted paper needs to register for the workshop and for one or more days of the conference.

Important Dates:
December 21, 2015: Early Bird Submissions
January 21, 2016: Submission deadline
February 7, 2016: Notification of acceptance
May 7, 2016: Workshop

Organizing committee:
Margaret Hall, Athanasios Mazarakis, Isabella Peters, Martin Chorley, Simon Caton, Jens-Erik Mai, Markus Strohmaier
Questions? Find more information and follow the conversation at www.facebook.com/followinguserpathways & http://www.ksri.kit.edu/1516.php