ICWSM 2008 - Seattle

Tomorrow starts the ICWSM 2008 conference (http://www.icwsm.org), this year in Seattle. So far, not as sunny as Colorado of last year, but there in an undeniable charm to a city in snow.
The first day of the conference will begin in the late afternoon, with two tutorial sessions:
1. Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis, by Jan Wiebe: about the methods for analysis of data (text) for subjective detection, measurement and analysis, allowing extraction of opinions and attitudes from textual content. With respect to the Boardscape, there is very little research done so far in detecting fluctuation of public opinion across forums. How do we define subjectivity in forums? How do we detect it? Is the subjective "lexicon" in forums different than other social spaces such as the blogosphere or opinion sites?

As for the propagation of opinion-forming information between forums, this is where the second session fits..
2. Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis by Mary McGlohon and Christos Faloutsos: How do social structures form within a community? How do we measure and map it? How do we analyze trends, information and influence propagation? This is especially interesting for forums, to both try to identify social structures within a given forum, as well as social indirect relations between separate forums.

As we plan to open BoardTracker API to researchers, it would be interesting to see more academic research focusing on message boards.
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