WebSci '19

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 11th ACM Conference on Web Science (Websci’19),

June 30 – July 3, 2019, Boston, MA, USA.

This year, the conference theme is “Synergies for the Good: The Web and Society”. We welcomed

interdisciplinary contributions, especially those that had a broad perspective on the web, including

those that combined analyses of web data with other types of data (e.g., from surveys or interviews)

to better understand user behavior (online and offline); carried out longitudinal studies; presented

successful cases of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary web research; used mixed-method

approaches; critically reflected on the methods used; discussed responsible forms of Web Science

(e.g. regarding standards, methods, generalizability of results); and/or those that reflected on the

societal impact of web research, how the web is perceived in the media and in society, and whether

this clashes with our self-image of Web Science. Thus, research on the interaction of society and the

web was invited, and we received submissions highlighting web implications, synergies derived,

and how the web as a socio-technical system will evolve in future.

WebSci’19 was a unique conference where a multitude of disciplines converged in a creative and

critical dialogue with the aim of understanding the web and its impacts. WebSci’19 welcomed

participation from diverse fields including (but not limited to) art, anthropology, computer and

information sciences, communication, economics, humanities, informatics, law, linguistics,

philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. Following the tradition of earlier

conferences, contributions to WebSci’19 aimed to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. The

community engaged with novel and thought-provoking ideas and discussed original research,

work in progress, analysis, and practice in the field of Web Science, its current theoretical,

methodological, and epistemological challenges as well as Web practices of individuals,

collectives, institutions, and platforms. 

This year we were very pleased to accept 41 submissions for the regular research track chosen out

of 130 submissions. We are grateful for the support of the Program Committee which consisted of

16 senior members and 66 regular members who selected an interesting, varied, exciting program

comprising 31 long and 10 short papers. In addition to the posters selected from the Call for

Posters, eight contributions were invited to be presented as a poster because they sparked fruitful

discussions among the reviewers and were deemed to be of great interest and relevance to the

WebSci’19 community.

This year WebSci’19 encouraged authors to particularly prepare and publish reproducibility

information of conducted research and resources, such as source code and datasets. Authors were

asked to add (if possible) a link (e.g. DOI or URL) to data or any other information relevant to their

submission. With this measure WebSci’19 aimed at raising awareness of the reproducibility issue

and demonstrated that, as a community-driven conference, it subscribes to and actively promotes

Open Science principles in research.