Call for Proposals: “Demography in the Digital Age”

On August 15th 2014, Facebook is sponsoring a conference on data collection in the digital age. Planned for the day before the American Sociological Association meetings in SF, the conference aims to bring together faculty, grad students, and industry professionals to share techniques related to data collection with the advent of social media and increased interconnectivity across the world.

We request papers or extended abstracts from researchers, academics, or professionals working in these areas who would like to present. We will have two categories of talks, presentations and lightning talks. Presentations should be approximately 20 minutes and focus on a barrier and solution you have encountered related to the increasing availability of digital data collection. Where possible, academics and industry professionals working in the same area will be paired, with a 20 minute joint Q&A to follow each pair of presentations. There will be additional “lightning talks” of 3-5 minutes that can be used to present a novel problem and solution . Facebook representatives will be available throughout the conference to discuss the company’s academic outreach and role in the research community.

The conference will run approximately 10a.m.–7p.m. at the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, CA. Facebook will run complimentary shuttles from the ASA conference hotel to our campus. The program will consist of three or four sessions of presentations, with lightning talks interspersed between sessions. The conference will focus on the technical and methodological options available to population researchers in the age of social media and widespread digital interconnectivity. While on our campus, we will serve lunch, give tours of the campus, and end with a cocktail mixer from 5–7p.m. Shuttles will return participants to the conference hotel during and after the mixer.

We are interested in any relevant topics, including:

• Using digital devices to collect data for social science.
• Surveying vulnerable populations.
• Mode effects between digital, phone, and face to face surveys.
• Syncing attitudinal and behavioral data.

Please submit abstracts to organizers Michael Corey (mrcorey@fb.com) and Peter Brandon (pbrandon@albany.edu). Abstracts should:

• Be no more than page in length.
• Specify a preference for a lightning talk (5 min) or presentation (20 min).
• Abstracts will be reviewed on a rolling basis from Friday Feb 28th by a panel of industry and academic experts.

A separate call for attendees will be sent once a draft program is created. Please mark your calendars and follow us @ http://www.facebook.com/DigitalDemography2014