[Linganth] Call for Papers: Social Media + Society Special Issue: Semantic Media

[Ilana Gershon]

In case this appeals to someone:

Call for Papers

Social Media + Society Special Issue: Semantic Media

Editors: Andrew Iliadis and Heather Ford

This special issue focuses on “semantic media,” which we define as media 
technologies that primarily orchestrate and convey facts, answers, 
meanings, and “knowledge” about things directly in media products, 
rather than lead people to other sources. Search engines and virtual 
assistants respond directly to questions based on textual or verbal 
searches (e.g., “Things to do in Philadelphia?” or “What is the capital 
of Israel?”). The special issue is thus dedicated to the often-invisible 
ways (to the non-specialist) that internet companies are now actively 
involved in constructing “knowledge” about the world. Organizations like 
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon extract, curate, and 
store facts served to users in new and emerging media products. Such 
processes have significant implications for the politics of knowledge 
sharing in the future.

We seek papers that examine how design decisions “bake” these facts into 
the apps and platforms people use daily while focusing on the 
infrastructures dedicated to orchestrating and presenting this 
information. The goal is to understand the technologies that will drive 
social and political outcomes when large internet companies become a 
primary conduit through which people directly acquire an understanding 
of facts about the world. We also seek to understand how governments, 
nonprofit, and nongovernmental organizations engage these media 
technologies. Semantic media are less about searching for keywords and 
matches on different websites that are then ranked for people to choose. 
Instead, they deal with identifying and describing entities (things like 
people, products, and places) and directing interactions with those 
entities (actions like purchasing, scheduling, and contacting). How do 
semantic media identify concepts and connect related information about 
them? How do companies and organizations produce facts and organize the 
data? From where does the data originate? What do these semantic 
processes mean for web users and administrators? What types of 
gatekeeping or safety checks do companies and organizations perform 
concerning these facts?

Today’s semantic media have a long history reaching back to the 
“Semantic Web” project initiated by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Yet, 
media researchers do not adequately cover how companies and 
organizations implement semantic technologies on platforms relative to 
their central role. These semantic technologies are in proprietary and 
open source products, and extensive media platforms are now using them 
to provide facts and represent knowledge to various publics. Google’s 
Knowledge Graph is a database of facts that Google uses to provide quick 
answers to the public, and such graphs are in use at other companies. At 
the same time, Wikipedia has a product called Wikidata that similarly 
stores facts about the world in data formats through which various apps 
can retrieve the data. Researchers and journalists also use semantic 
technologies for search engine optimization, fact-checking practices, 
and data sharing and organization. This special issue thus focuses on 
such platformized versions of fact production and examines the 
underlying infrastructures, histories, and modeling techniques used in 
knowledge representation systems.

We are interested in quantitative, qualitative, and critical approaches 
and papers that propose new methods, theories, and frameworks.

Areas of interest:

• The creation or transmission of facts, answers, meanings, definitions, 
and “knowledge” across media systems and their platforms
• Answers from virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Bixby, etc.
• Answers from search engines such as Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, etc.
• Products like knowledge panels, infoboxes, carousels, rich results, 
maps, etc.
• Open-source semantic technologies such as Schema.org, Wikidata, etc.
• Proprietary semantic technologies such as Google’s Knowledge Graph, etc.
• Fact-checking practices for misinformation and disinformation across 
semantic media platforms
• Search engine optimization and semantic search practices
• Semantic infrastructure projects such as the semantic web, linked 
data, etc.
• Semantic governance organizations such as the World Wide Web 
Consortium, etc.
• Semantic technologies such as metadata, markup languages, knowledge 
bases, knowledge graphs, web schemas, applied ontologies, and enterprise 
semantic software
• Semantic, linguistic, and conceptual theories involving rules and 
logic, theories of meaning, ontology, taxonomy, ideas of truth, social 
ontology, etc.

Timeline:

• Extended 1000-word abstracts due Fri July 15
• Decisions out to authors Fri Aug 19
• Full 8000-word manuscript due Fri Nov 18
• Final decisions January 2023
• Submit to journal February 2023
• Publication spring 2023

Send submissions to andrew.iliadis at temple.edu and 
heather.ford at uts.edu.au with the subject header “Social Media + Society 
Special Issue: Semantic Media”

Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/sms/collections/cfp

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