Web Studies: 1st international congress

The Web may be conceived as an expansive object, an extended space that reaches nearly every domain of life and concerns many different scientific disciplines. This space can be described according to data structures, visual surfaces, algorithmic processes, cultural uses, means and venue for artistic expressions and site of human-computer interaction. While some of these categories correspond to the specific interests and demands of certain fields of inquiry, they also have a practical dimension that goes beyond the confines of academic disciplines and implies the crossing of very different perspectives. One of the most interesting questions is indeed the way in which practices of production and use influence and re/shape each other as well as the tools and media themselves.

From this general starting point, we aim at exploring the social dimension of Web applications as well as the interaction and co-existence of humans with artificial agents - interfaces, algorithms, information architectures - forming socio-technical hybrids that are increasingly difficult to dissect. And our research tools and methods have themselves become hybrid. Mixtures of brains, knowledge and research software make sense of the growing piles of data; they produce new and innovative ways to explore and visualize information and to make the Web comprehensible; and they generate theoretical metaphors aim at understanding the space they are operating in. The notion of Web Intelligence is therefore of particular interest to this first edition of the Web Studies conference. Intelligence, here, is understood in a double sense: first, as the process of interaction that happens not only between humans and technical systems, but also between human actors mediated by Web platforms, the process in which knowledge is produced and applied, information is gathered, interpreted, and used in everyday situations. Second, as the tools and methods that help us understanding the infinite variety that marks this online ecosystem.