[visionlist] Call for papers: Workshop on creativity and attention in the age of the web

[Sebastian Pannasch]

CALL FOR PAPERS

*WORKSHOP ON CREATIVITY AND ATTENTION IN THE AGE OF THE WEB**
*
http://ac.aup.fr/croda/tclab/creativity&attentionWorkshop2013.html

AT ACM WEB SCIENCE 2013
PARIS, MAY 1 2013

OBJECTIVES

Many researchers have highlighted the connection between attention and 
creativity. The Web environment significantly affects the manner in 
which we allocate attention to information, tasks, and people.
This workshop addresses the question of what impact this has on creative 
pursuits. We look at creativity at many levels, from personal creativity 
(e.g. the different ways in which a student may solve a problem) to 
big-C creativity that generates new high impact findings. We concentrate 
on the effects that the Web environment has on on human attention and on 
all these types of creativity. In particular, we will focus on 
empirical/experimental as well as conceptual research connecting topics 
such as: new types of creativity enabled by the web; the influence of 
Web-based environments on human attention; cognitive offload and its 
consequences; group creativity; creativity outsourcing.

INTRODUCTION

We are living in the age defined by innovation driven economy. The 
ubiquity of the web in our lives (work and leisure time) forces us to 
reconsider our fundamental preconceptions regarding the creative and 
innovation processes. The complexity and the requirements of this new 
environment tell us that the age of the lone asocial romanticist genius 
is gone. Collaboration and collective creation is a must. Does the web 
facilitates these processes? And, if so,then in what way? What can we do 
to take advantage of what the web offers? How does it affect 
individuals? What are the consequences for education?

All these questions have prompted an unprecedented academic interest on 
creativity that is well represented by several academic meeting such as 
the International ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition 2013 in 
Sydney, the AAAI 2013 Spring Symposium on Creativity and Cognitive 
Development in Stanford, the Mobile Learning and Creativity Workshop in 
Saarbrücken (September 2012), and the Creative Web Symposium: 
Computational Creativity as a Web-Service in South Corea (December 
2012). Our workshop, while aligning with the meetings above, aims at 
exploring more specific issues of creativity that are immediately 
related to the particular environment created by the Web.

Every new medium introduces new creative opportunities and shortens the 
path from the creator to the consumer: from the invention of writing, 
the printing process, photography, movies, to the radio and TV, the 
telephone, digital computer to the current era of hyper connectivity, 
always-on, instant messaging, instant content producing and sharing. 
Unprecedented amount of all humane knowledge becomes easily available 
for many and our expectations of others (individuals and institutions) 
in terms of reactivity, productivity and efficiency is raised. Some 
researchers believe that the more constraints we have to overcome, the 
easier it becomes to create. Would then democratization of access to 
information and cheap communication actually lessen creativity, or 
reduce it to trivial creations?
On the other hand, creative behaviour has been connected with breath of 
attention (e.g. Kasof 1997, Friedman et al. 2003) and in general, wide 
attention deployment and defocused attention are considered to lead to 
greater creativity. Several researchers share the view that creativity 
requires variations in the field of attention (Gabora 2007, Vartanian 
2009) and some experimental results hint that distractions improve 
creativity (Baird et al. 2012; Gallate et al. 2012). Based on these 
considerations one could expect that forced changes in attention focus 
such as those generated by many Web 2.0 applications, may actually 
improve creativity. However, previous research also tells us of other 
related factors that may intervene with a possible negative effect. For 
example it has been observed that stress or arousal, generated for 
example by time pressure or evaluation apprehension, may reduce breadth 
of attention and therefore hinder creativity (Karau and Kelly 1992; 
Smith, Michael, and Hocevar 1990); that interruptions are more likely to 
hinder, rather than improve, creativity, and that different types of 
interruptions may have varying degree of impact on different creative 
activities (Roda et al. 2013).

CALL FOR PAPERS AND DEMONSTRATIONS

In this half-day workshop we invite researchers and practitioners for an 
exploration of the influence of the Web environment on human attention 
and creativity. We welcome short papers reporting empirical/experimental 
as well as conceptual research connecting topics such as:

New types of creativity enabled by the web
The influence of Web based environments on human attention
Cognitive offload and its consequences
Group creativity
Creativity outsourcing

We invite full papers (8 pages), short / position papers (2-4 pages), 
and/or demonstrations to be submitted to gstojanov at aup.edu by March 21

Demonstrations should be available online and be accompanied by a short 
description (no more than 2 pages).

All submissions will be reviewed by three members of the Program Committee.

We will pursue the possibility of publishing a selected number of papers 
in the special issue of a journal.

IMPORTANT DATES
Papers/Demo due March 21 2013
Review feedback March 29 2013
Workshop May 2 2013

ORGANISATION

Organising committee

Georgi Stojanov - The American University of Paris (France)
Claudia Roda - The American University of Paris (France)
Bipin Indurkhya - International Institute of Technology, Hyderabad 
(India) and AGH University of Science and Technology, Cracow (Poland)

Program committee

Sandra Bruno, Université de Cergy-Pontoise
Jayson P. Harsin, The American University of Paris
Thomas Kirste, University of Rostock
Mohammad Majid al-Rifaie, Goldsmiths' College, University of London
Amitash Ohja International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
Sebastian Pannasch, Technische Universitaet Dresden
Goran Trajkovski, Virginia International University
Giovanni Vincenti, Towson University
Sharon Wood, University of Sussex

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