By: Ryan Hedrick
An IU Information Science faculty member and two doctoral students started the new year off big by attending a major international conference in Hawaii earlier this month.
From Jan. 3-6, Prof. Pnina Fichman, along with Information Science doctoral students Meredith Dedema and Holly Lopez Long, attended the 56th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Another IU Information Science professor, Susan Herring, also had a paper at the conference.
The HICSS is an annual event focused on the areas of information, computer, and system sciences. More than 1,100 scientists, hailing from more than 45 countries, attended this year’s conference, which was held in Kaanapali, on the island of Maui. From the 1,429 papers submitted to this year’s iteration of the HICSS only 678 were accepted.
This was the first year the conference was held in person since before the start of the pandemic. Fichman said it was good to finally be back in person and be able to interact face-to-face with her fellows in the scholarly community.
“This was the first time since 2020 that the conference was held in person and it was a great success,” she said. “One of the main goals of the conference is to foster discussions of the papers during the sessions to allow for constructive feedback on each paper. I’ve missed these intriguing discussions.”
Fichman had two papers accepted into this year’s conference, and of the two doctoral students that attended the conference, each co-authored one of the papers with Fichman.
As part of the conference’s “Internet and Digital Economy” track, Fichman and Dedema presented their paper “Boundary Crossing through Text and Image on Instagram in an Online Community of Practice.” The paper focused on factors that influenced the permeability of the boundaries of those communities during early parts of the pandemic.
Then, as part of the “Digital and Social Media” track, Lopez Long and Fichman presented their paper “The Impact of Politeness on Conversational Outcomes in Mobile Dating Apps.” The paper looked at how politeness and imposition impacted conversational outcomes on mobile dating apps.
Also in the “Digital and Social Media” track, Dedema presented the paper she co-authored with Herring. Their paper, titled “How Cover Images Represent Video Content: A Case Study of Bilibili,” examined the different components of video cover images on the Chinese video sharing platform Bilibili.
According to Fichman, all of the papers were well received and she felt like each presentation resulted in interesting discussions among conference attendees. Also, Fichman said that attending such a major conference is a huge deal for the doctoral students that accompanied her to Hawaii.
“It is very important for students to attend scholarly conferences, not only because they can share their research and attend cutting edge research presentations, but also because they can network and become part of the scholarly community,” Fichman said.