Call for papers

Call for papers: Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: driving the Data Science agenda

The theme recognises that in recent years there has been an explosion in the amount of data available, whether from tweets to blogs, data from sensors through to “citizen science”, government data, health and genome data and social survey data.

Technology allows us to treat as ‘data’ content which would not once have merited the term – recordings of speech or song, video of dance or theatre or animal behaviour – and to treat as quantitative what once could only be qualitative.

There are challenges in finding data and making it findable, in the ability to use it effectively, to take and understand data, to process, to analyse and extract value from data, to visualize data and then to communicate the stories behind it.

This process is now being termed data science. It is being used across sectors to describe a wide range of data activities in the commercial, government and academic sectors dealing with information whose primary purpose is often not research-related. Activities are not discipline-specific; in fact data science is being described in some quarters as a new discipline.

The IDCC13 Programme Committee invites submissions to the 8th International Digital Curation Conference that reflect our conference theme.

Infrastructure
(Management of data)

• Global, national, regional, local partnerships for research infrastructure
• Repositories landscape - institutional, disciplinary, blended
• Data storage- file stores, tiered storage, cloud v local
• Integrating business systems and research information management
• Data security and privacy, legislative and regulatory frameworks
• Costs and resourcing - analysis, benefits, cost models, business planning
• Human infrastructure- data scientists, researchers, librarians, IT services, research support officers, public engagement officers
• Education of researchers and curators of the present and future

Intelligence
(Data use)

• Harnessing the value of open data
• Citation & linking, identification systems
• Metadata & para data
• Data quality, provenance
• Data mining, data analysis/predictive analytics
• Integration of qualitative and quantitative sources
• Data visualisation, data journalism
• Business intelligence
• Data publication and its role in scholarly communication
• Blending information from varied sources

Innovation
(Future developments)

• Tools eg. data management planning, data informatics, data visualisation, data analysis, data mining
• Workflows in the data lifecycle
• Training and skills eg. data science curriculum, core skills for the data scientist, training programmes and modules
• Advocacy and guidance
• Implementation of cultural change - barriers and enablers, organisational structures

Subject matter could be policy-related, strategic, operational, infrastructural, tool-based, experimental, empirical or theoretical in nature.

Structure and organisation should be appropriate for the disciplinary area. Papers should not have been published in their current or a very similar form before, other than as a pre-print in a repository.

The conference will include research tracks, practice tracks and poster sessions as well as associated workshops. 

Research papers will be eligible for publication as peer-reviewed articles in the International Journal of Digital Curation.

Practice submissions for which full papers are received will be considered for publication as general articles in IJDC. 

Poster submissions will receive dedicated viewing time during the event, as well as a brief elevator pitch and plenary slot.

Submission deadlines

• Research papers and practitioner paper abstracts are due by 20 August 2012
• Workshop proposals are due by 21 September 2012
• Submission of abstracts for poster/demos are due by 29 October 2012

Further details are available on the 'dates' page

Templates for submission and details of the ConfTool system are available on the 'submissions' page