Call for Contributions

Workshop goals

The aim of the BIIRRR workshop series is to provide a forum where researchers from the full spectrum of CHIIR interests can come together to develop ideas on improving resource reuse. At the previous BIIRRR workshops, we identified a number of focus areas essential to resource re-use in interactive information retrieval. We distilled these into a manifesto [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3406522.3446056] published at CHIIR 2021, which highlighted the potential and challenges of research documentation and archiving for future reuse.

Any part of a study (research design, research data, research infrastructure) is valuable for reuse at any level of granularity, from reproducing complete studies to single survey or interview questions. What is needed to enable reuse may vary for different methods, for instance, documentation for qualitative methods may require a different format than for quantitative methods, but both can be described in a structured and standardized way. In this context, it is particularly important that any guidelines or standards are flexible, adaptable, and can evolve as the research in the community evolves. The openness of the II&R community must not be restricted and extensive discussions are needed on how to balance standardisation, space for innovation and for aspects that can only be documented to a limited extent. 

BIIRRR 2022 is the third edition in the series and focuses on developing recommendations for documenting and archiving the wide range of II&R research resources, and to ensure that the documentation standards are relevant and applicable to both the specifics and breadth of the CHIIR community.

Towards this end, the workshop has two main goals:

  • Collect practical experiences with documentation and reuse. We solicit experience and position papers to collect more examples of practical barriers, challenges, and approaches to documenting complex study setups. In an experience paper, authors can further document one of their previous II&R studies and analyze it in terms of the possibilities and challenges for the reuse of their research designs, data and infrastructure. Position papers discuss challenges and proposals in a more abstract manner.
  • Develop recommendations for research design documentation. Research designs are the first step in documenting research resources. The second goal of the 2022 edition of the BIIRRR workshop is to start discussing and developing recommendations for research design documentation. Our explicit aim is to develop an open proposal that can be used across the full range of study types in the II&R community and that is open to further development.

Paper contributions

We invite two types of original contributions: experience papers and position papers. In experience papers, authors analyze one of their previous II&R studies in terms of research designs, research data, or research infrastructure in the context of reuse. Authors should not focus their contribution on the outcomes of their described studies, but on their thoughts and considerations in designing, setting up and adapting their studies as well as on efforts to connect their II&R study to previous work by others and aspects that make reuse of earlier work difficult. These experiences are rarely made explicit and the focus of discussion, but are necessary to further the discussion on reuse and sharing in IIR. Any details you think might be relevant for others to understand the choices made are good to have in your experience paper. 

Position papers describe and/or argue for challenges, benefits, best practices, perspectives on, and strategies for improving resource reuse in IIR. We also invite comments, feedback, and ideas on how to evolve the principles for II&R resources re-use or II&R resources reuse as suggested in the manifesto.

The paper contributions will be presented in themed sessions in the morning. The afternoon will then discuss the main ideas and challenges from the morning session in break-out groups. The workshop will conclude with a collaborative writing session aimed at developing an open proposal for documenting research designs that can be used across the full range of study types in the II&R community and that is open to further development

All submissions should be in English and should not have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere. However, in the case of experience papers, they may be based on already published experimental II&R studies and expand upon research design descriptions, methodological decision-making, and successes and failures. Papers should be between 4 and 8 pages formatted in the ACM Proceedings Style and submitted via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=biirrr2022). All submissions will be peer reviewed by the Program Committee.  Submissions will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Relevant links

Registration for BIIRRR 2022 workshop goes via CHIIR 2022: https://ai.ur.de/chiir2022/register
Contact the organizers: biirrr@googlegroups.com