SEASON 2025: Conference Overview
Important Dates
- Submission for all categories via EasyChair:
30th of April 2025 10th of May 2025
- Notification: 20th of June 2025
- Revised submissions: 15th of July 2025
- Conference dates: 24-25 September 2025
Registration and conference fee
Register now to join us at the SEASON 2025 Conference: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=season2025 .
Early bird rates (until 1 August 2025):
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€100 (regular)
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€30 (student)
After 1 August, the registration fees will rise to €150 for regular attendees and €50 for students.
For assistance with the registration and payment process on EasyChair, please refer to our step-by-step guide, available here:
Registration and Payment Guide- SEASON 2025
Keynote Speakers
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Prof. Anne Beaulieu
Search engines beyond search: questions for a critical knowledge infrastructure
Prof. dr. Anne Beaulieu holds the Aletta Jacobs Chair of Knowledge Infrastructures at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is co-author of Data and Society: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2021), of Smart Grids from a Global Perspective (Springer, 2016), and of Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2012). She also chairs the editorial board of the Liveable Futures book series at Amsterdam University Press. In 2023-24, she was joint fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and of the Data Science Centre at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-coordinated the PhD training network of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). This presentation is based on her book Revealing Relations: Knowledge Relations for Liveable Futures (Bristol University Press, 2026).
Abstract: Search engines play a powerful role in ordering knowledge and in shaping interactions with data, sources or documents. The current dominance of ‘search’ has been well documented and various facets (relevance, optimization, ranking, bias) have been examined and refines in sophisticated ways. But as search engines become further embedded in layered knowledge infrastructures, it is all the more important to unearth how search shapes knowledge needs and how these needs are met. In this presentation, I want to share a number of questions to explore important assumptions of search engines: It is possible to imagine other functions for search engines, besides supporting retrieval? Can a search engine succeed otherwise than through best match? Can assumptions be foregrounded so that search engines are more reflexive–at what cost and with which advantages? How do conversational interfaces increase the urgency of questioning these assumptions? These questions can spur new interactions and explorations across lines of work, connecting epistemology and design, ethics and computation, politics and indexing.
Thursday, September 25, 2025
Matthias Spielkamp
AlgorithmWatch: Algorithmic Accountability Reporting Revisited

Photo: Julia Bornkessel, CC BY 4.0
Matthias Spielkamp is co-founder and executive director of AlgorithmWatch (Theodor Heuss Medal 2018, Grimme Online Nominee 2019, Brandenburger Freiheitspreis 2023) and founder and president of AlgorithmWatch CH. He is a member of the advisory council to the German Digital Services Coordinator (DSC), elected by the German Bundestag. Matthias testified before committees of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the German Bundestag and other institutions on automation and AI and was a member of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) from 2020-2022. Matthias serves on the governing boards of the German section of Reporters Without Borders and Stiftung Warentest, the advisory councils of Freudenberg Stiftung and the Whistleblower Network and the Expert Committee on Communication/Information of Germany’s UNESCO Commission. He was a fellow of ZEIT Stiftung, Stiftung Mercator and the American Council on Germany. Matthias is editor of the Automating Society reports and has written and edited books on the automation of society, digital journalism and Internet governance. He holds master’s degrees in Journalism from the University of Colorado in Boulder and in Philosophy from the Free University of Berlin.
Abstract: In 2015, a handful of people set out to create an entire organisation around the idea of “holding algorithms accountable to democracy”. 10 years later, after various attempts to pry open the black boxes of search engines, social media and “AI”, it’s time to take stock: What have we achieved, what is still lacking, what is on the horizon?
Accepted Contributions
We are pleased to share the contributions selected for SEASON 2025. The programme includes a diverse range of formats and topics at the intersection of search engines and society.
Long Presentations
- Politically Misleading Large Language Models: Evidence From the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections Reveals LLM Fact-Checking Limitations – Joachim Baumann, Aleksandra Urman, Ronald E. Robertson and Aniko Hannak
- Assessing Recommendation Diversity in Search Results: Approaches Using Data Donations and Artificial Personas – Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Ashwin Nagappa, Abdul Obeid, Shir Weinbrand and Brett Tweedie
- Ambisearchers: Search Modalities and Algorithmic Awareness – Meghan Dowell
- Exploring the search for home and belonging. Search engines as players on the property market. – Jessica Enevold Duncan and Ann-Sofie Klareld
- Reimagining Search: A Privacy-Preserving and Inclusive Infrastructure for Disability Knowledge Retrieval– Noor Afshan Fathima, Noor Khuthejatul Kubra and Andreas Wagner
- Detecting and Quantifying Bias in Search Query Suggestions for US Politicians – Fabian Haak and Philipp Schaer
- Conceptualising Ignorance Logics in Search — with Examples of Environmental Issues – Jutta Haider and Malte Rödl
- Auditing Google’s AI Overviews and Featured Snippets: A Case Study on Baby Care and Pregnancy – Desheng Hu, Aleksandra Urman, Joachim Baumann, Elsa Lichtenegger, Robin Forsberg, Aniko Hannak and Christo Wilson
- “Be like others”: On what search engines tell us about our nations – Vihang Jumle, Mykola Makhortykh and Maryna Sydorova
- Reclaiming Search: Ecosia and the Shifting Moral Economy of Digital Infrastructure – Karine Lespinasse
- Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Online Search: Findings from a Study Commissioned by the German State Media Authorities – Dirk Lewandowski
- Evaluating Search Engines‘ Influence on Democratic Values: An Analysis Through the Lens of Information Ethics – Katharina Leyrer
- Rethinking search intent: from traditional search engines to AI-powered information retrieval – Elsa Lichtenegger, Aleksandra Urman and Anikó Hannák
- Missing relations in online information access: A conceptualization of LLMs in the information ecosystem – Nora Lindemann
- Auditing what the algorithm pays attention to at the time of war: How image search framed the Russian-Ukrainian war before and after the 2022 invasion – Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova, Aleksandra Urman and Roberto Ulloa
- Ethics-by-design: A ‘values compass’ for open web search – Renée Ridgway and Daniela Zetti
- Re-search.site: a bespoke platform for capturing, comparing and critiquing knowledge infrastructures of searching – Renée Ridgway
- Negotiating knowledge by referring to search: exploring the verb ‘to google’ in Swedish online discussions on the climate – Malte Rödl
- From Validity to Inter-Subjectivity: An Argument for Reliability Metadata in Search Environments – Frans van der Sluis
- Bias is in the Eye of the Beholder: How Users Understand Search Engine Bias and How It Affects Trust in Search Results – Vziatysheva Victoria, Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova and Vihang Jumle
Short Presentations
- Global reach and local context: the impact of bilinguality on online search – Cecilia Andersson
- Topic extraction and query generation from websites – Kardelen Bilir
- Investigating the Reinforcement of Social Norms in Image Search Results – Tim Gollub, Ann-Marie Wohlfahrt, Pierre Achkar and Benno Stein
- Towards Inclusive Search: Integrating Language Complexity in Information Retrieval – Jennifer Gnyp and Tobias Siebenlist
- Decentralizing Web Search: the PeARS search engine – Aurelie Herbelot
- How search engines frame political initiatives – Vihang Jumle, Mykola Makhortykh, Maryna Sydorova and Victoria Vziatysheva
- Empirically measuring algorithmically embodied emissions of information access systems – Florian Meier and David Elsweiler
- Visualizing social memory – How visual search engines structure the social memory – Robert Musil
- ChatGPT vs Google Search: A topic flow analysis of Reddit discussions – Kristofer Rolf Söderström
- Effect of search engine optimisation on reliable healthcare information online | Healthcare SEO – Natalie Tutzer
Interactive Sessions
- Search Engine Ethics and You: Co-Designing Tools for Public Engagement – Rosie Graham
- Educational consequences of the changing landscape of searching – Olof Sundin, Anna-Lena Godhe, Amanda Persson and Jan Ole Størup
Posters
- SearchBench: Evaluating Citation Practices in AI-Powered Search Engines – Joachim Baumann, Kshitijaa Jaglan, Elsa Lichtenegger, Aleksandra Urman, Desheng Hu and Aniko Hannak
- Gerontological Perspectives on Technostress and E-Fatigue Among University of the Philippines Diliman Librarians: Insights on Their Use of Search Engines – Miriam Charmigrace Salcedo, Maria Maura Tinao and Jessie Rose Bagunu
- NPDS FAIR Search Engines with Interoperable Exchange of the Free Flow of Findable Facts in Open Collaboration Networks – Adam Craig and Carl Taswell
- Query Log Analysis on an Academic Search Portal for Economics and Business Studies – Oliver Hahn, Ralf Krestel and Marianne Saam
- What Citizens Search and Municipal Websites Offer – Helena Häußler
- Ranking of Wikipedia Articles in Search Engines. Partial replication of the study ”Ranking of Wikipedia articles revisited” from 2011 – Hanna Käfer
- Reflecting on search histories: a survey design to uncover users’ cognitive and motivational processes – Elsa Lichtenegger, Aleksandra Urman and Anikó Hannák
- Planetary sapiens: search engines, utopias and dystopias – Mikael Eriksson
- Invisible in Search? Auditing Gender Bias in the Visual Representation of Holocaust Victims on Google – Mykola Makhortykh, Tobias Rohrbach and Maryna Sydorova
- Algorithmic Masculinity – Encounters with the Manosphere – Amanda Persson
- Web Search on Emerging Topics – Alisa Rieger and Ran Yu
- Beyond Topicality: How do Social and Life Scientists select what to read? – Jacqueline Sachse
- Do They Capture All the Attention? Analyzing Google’s AI Overviews Using Eye-Tracking and Quality Evaluation – Sebastian Schultheiß and Dirk Lewandowski
- Enhancing Open Data Findability through Generative AI: A Conceptual Approach to Improving Structured Data Discovery – Tobias Siebenlist and Jennifer Gnyp
- Climate disinformation on Google Search: An audit of Google’s algorithms and principle of trustworthiness. – Åsa Rolfsdotter Söderberg and Agnes Tibbelin
- Are schools suitable for (information literacy) education? Perspectives from Danish lower secondary school – Jan Ole Størup
- ReSearch: Researching the transforming landscape of information seeking – AI technologies and learning in Swedish schools – Olof Sundin, Anna-Lena Godhe and Kristofer Rolf Söderström
Programme Committee
- Rosie Graham, University of Birmingham, UK
- Jutta Haider, SSLIS, University of Borås, Sweden
- Dirk Lewandowski, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
- Astrid Mager, Institute of Technology Assessment Vienna (ITA), Austria
- Renée Ridgway, Aarhus University, Denmark
- Sebastian Schultheiß, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
- Olof Sundin, Lund University, Sweden
- Kristofer Söderström, Lund University, Sweden
Travel Information
The organisers recommend that participants travel by train. The event will take place at the Faculty of Design, Media and Information at Finkenau 35 in Hamburg.
Contact Information
We look forward to welcoming you to Hamburg in September. If you have any queries or questions, please contact: