ICIS 2012 – Track on Visual Media

Track Chairs:
Michel Avital (michel@avital.net), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Dianne Cyr (cyr@sfu.ca), Simon Fraser University (Canada)

Track Description:

The widespread application and use of visual media combined with the diffusion of the Internet provides new breakthrough opportunities for the production, packaging and communication of scholarly work. Visual media, and in particular video, has become a popular mode of knowledge dissemination and has evolved as a central feature of mainstream media. Video is used to convey virtually everything –from information about current events, opinions and commentaries, to instructions, testimonies and artistic expressions – and can be found in most electronic newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other designated repositories. Other forms of visual media, such as interactive displays, visual analytics, and animation, are making headway as well in their respective niches.

Overall, the Visual Media Track is geared to promote and provide space for provocative ideas, generative thinking, and compelling initiatives with respect to the application of visual media in the context of information systems research and scholarship. By offering a place for dialogue and new delivery capabilities, the track is designed to promote the exchange of ideas among researchers who are interested to explore aspects of visual media that emphasize capacity to construct better scholarship, better technologies, and better human systems. A goal of this new track is to illustrate the affordances of visual media and how it can augment or transform the prevailing text-based scholarly discourse.

The Visual Media Track provides an opportunity to examine the implications of visual media for scholarly work and to experiment with its generative capabilities. We are particularly looking for contributions that demonstrate how visual media may change the way scholars present their work and subsequently how it may change the academic discourse. In lieu of conventional text-based papers, we invite submissions that rely heavily on visual media to convey research findings and opinions on issues related to information technology. The following topics are of special interest:

* Conceptualizing visual media as a vehicle for delivery and dissemination of research
* Illustrating visual media as a means of communicating research findings
* Exploring the impact of visual media on research practices and knowledge production
* Contextualizing visual media in the prevailing academic discourse and community life
* Exploring visual media-based methodologies for capturing the dynamics and complexities of socio-technical phenomena.

Submission Instructions:

Submissions that rely on the use of visual media such as video, animation, visual analytics, etc., should be submitted to the new Visual Media Track, regardless of their topic. Both Completed Research and Research-in-Progress papers will be considered. Authors of accepted submissions, including research in progress, are expected to deliver visual-media rich presentations.

Submissions may range from research papers with visual media portions (e.g., video clips) to standalone video or other visual media that convey research outcomes or other content of interest. For an example of a paper that makes excellent use of visual media, please see Arnall & Martinussen (2010) (http://bit.ly/Arnall-et-al).

Papers with embedded video clips should conform to the general page limit requirements. The visual media portion of the submission should be no more than 15 minutes (in total) for a complete research paper and 7 minutes for a research in progress paper. (Well-argued exceptions to these length requirements will be considered on a case by case basis, and must be preapproved by the Visual Media Track chairs).

Submissions must be made via Manuscript Central according to the general submission requirements of ICIS, using the ICIS submission template. If the entire submission is in the form of visual media (e.g. a video clip), please embed a link to the underlying work in a single page that includes the title, the submission type, a link to the underlying work including URL(s), and an extended abstract (in addition to the brief abstract that is requested as part of the submission’s meta data). Given the limitations of Manuscript Central, the visual media portion must be hosted outside the review system. We ask each author to create his/her own account with an open access provider of choice (e.g., linked video could be hosted in Vimeo or YouTube). Please use a pseudo user name in order to maintain anonymity during the initial review process.

The visual media portion of the submission must be playable in a generic Internet browser. Please fine-tune for Firefox. Please verify that all links to visual media work as expected in the system-generated PDF prior to submitting the paper to Manuscript Central. Do not change your online media after submitting the paper for review with Manuscript Central. We recommend using Creative Commons Licenses for the visual media portion of the submission.

Submissions should meet the normative research quality criteria of ICIS. Both substantive contribution and presentation content and quality will be evaluated in the review process.

ICIS Website: http://icis2012.aisnet.org/index.php/tracks/102-visual-media