Workshop on Hypertext and Social Media

Workshop on Hypertext and Social Media. The Workshop on Hypertext and Social Media (WHSM) is an annual academic event that explores the intersection of hypertext systems, social media platforms, and social network analysis. Traditionally held in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, it serves as a forum for presenting early-stage research, novel ideas, and interdisciplinary work. The workshop fosters discussion on the evolving dynamics between digital narratives, web science, and human-computer interaction.

History and background

The workshop was established in 2008, emerging from the long-standing ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media which itself evolved from the original ACM Hypertext conference series founded in the late 1980s. Its creation reflected the rapid rise of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which demanded new scholarly approaches to understanding user-generated content and online communities. Early workshops were often co-located with the main conference in venues across Europe and North America, including events in Pittsburgh, Toronto, and Paris. The initiative was supported by key figures in the hypertext community and institutions like the University of Koblenz-Landau and the University of California, Irvine.

Workshop themes and topics

Core themes of the workshop consistently address the structural and social aspects of interconnected digital systems. A primary focus is social network analysis, examining patterns of influence, community detection, and information diffusion within networks like LinkedIn and Instagram. Research on semantic web technologies and knowledge graphs explores how to enrich social media data with meaningful context. Other frequent topics include computational social science, sentiment analysis of posts from platforms like Reddit, digital humanities applications, and the design of collaborative filtering systems. The workshop also encourages work on ethical AI, misinformation propagation, and privacy in environments such as TikTok.

Organization and steering committee

The workshop is organized under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery and its SIGWEB special interest group. A dedicated steering committee, comprising senior researchers from academia and industry, oversees the workshop's direction and ensures its alignment with the broader ACM Hypertext conference. Past and present organizing committees have included scholars from institutions like the University of Southampton, the IT University of Copenhagen, and IBM Research. The program committee is typically composed of experts from fields including web science, data mining, and human-computer interaction, who manage the peer review process for submissions.

Proceedings and publications

Accepted papers at the workshop are published in the official conference proceedings by the Association for Computing Machinery and are included in the ACM Digital Library. These proceedings are often indexed in scholarly databases like DBLP and Scopus. Selected extended versions of workshop papers have sometimes been invited for publication in special issues of journals such as ACM Transactions on the Web or Social Network Analysis and Mining. The publications serve as an important record of evolving research on topics from crowdsourcing to network theory.

Impact and legacy

The workshop has had a significant impact on the development of the social computing research community, providing a vital incubator for ideas that later mature into full conference papers at venues like The Web Conference or AAAI. It has helped bridge the historical study of hypertext, championed by pioneers like Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart, with contemporary analysis of social networking services. Many researchers who presented early work at the workshop have gone on to influential positions in organizations like Google, Microsoft Research, and major universities, shaping the study of online social networks and digital ecosystems.

Category:Computer science conferences Category:Hypertext Category:Social media