WS.5 calls for contributions that interrogate the fast-evolving relationship between generative AI and the Web, how this relationship is transforming the ways we access, produce, authenticate, preserve, govern, and value information.

Over the past three decades, the Web has been structured around a set of familiar operations and infrastructures: publishing and linking, indexing and ranking, searching and browsing, platformization and API ecosystems. Today, generative AI systems, in particular LLMs and multimodal models, are being woven into web interfaces and web back-ends alike: answer engines and conversational search, writing assistants embedded in browsers and editors, agentic tools that navigate the Web on our behalf, synthetic content at web scale, and retrieval-augmented architectures that treat the Web simultaneously as knowledge base, training corpus, and distribution channel.

This new configuration raises fundamental questions for Web Studies. If the Web is increasingly encountered through model-mediated interactions, what becomes of the Web’s usual ways of showing where information comes from: links, sources, documents, and traceability? If prompting becomes a dominant access mode, how do we understand the shift from querying to instructing, from navigating to delegating, from search literacy to prompt literacy? How do we assess authority, provenance, bias, and uncertainty when answers are synthesized, personalized, and conversational? What happens to the link ecosystem, web publishing incentives, and the visibility of smaller sites when traffic is mediated by generative summaries? How do regulation, platform governance, licensing, and dataset construction reshape what the Web is and what it can be?

WS.5 welcomes theoretical, empirical, methodological, technical, critical, and creative contributions that examine generative AI as:

• An interface to the Web (prompting, chat-first browsing, answer experiences),
• A layer of infrastructure (RAG pipelines, web-scale corpora, indexing for AI),
• An emerging mode of production (synthetic media, automated web generation),
• A political economy (attention, labor, rights, and governance).

We particularly encourage work that crosses disciplines and traditions, from computer science to information science, media and communication studies, sociology, STS, digital humanities, design, law, education, and the arts, while maintaining a shared focus: the Web as object of inquiry.

• Paper Submission of abstracts and papers: Early June 2026
• Notification to authors: Mid-June, 2026
• Camera-ready papers due : Late Septeber, 2026
• Early registration for authors: early October, 2026
• Congress: 21, 22, 23 October, 2026

WS.5 invites submissions across intersecting clusters. The lists below are indicative rather than exhaustive.

• Generative AI for the Web: architectures, pipelines, and system design
• Conversational search and answer engines: interaction models, UX patterns, and user studies
• Agentic browsing and web automation: delegated action, reliability, and guardrails
• Web-scale corpora: crawling, filtering, documentation, representativeness, multilingual data
• APIs, web services, protocols, and standards
• Sustainability: compute costs, energy impacts, green AI, green Web intersections
• Accessibility and inclusive design for AI-mediated web experiences

• Human–AI collaboration in web writing, moderation, community management, and support
• Prompting vs searching: shifts in information-seeking strategies and cognitive models
• Provenance and citation in generated answers: new norms for attribution and traceability
• Journalism, education, libraries, and research practices under generative mediation

• The look and feel of the AI-mediated Web: interface aesthetics, conversational UI, design patterns
• Visual regimes of credibility: how UI/visualization shapes trust and authority
• AI-generated images & video on the Web: circulation, remix, authenticity, and reception
• Net art, browser-based art, interactive installations, and web performances
• Generative art and creative coding for/on the Web; prompt-based art practices
• Electronic literature, hypertext, interactive narratives, procedural storytelling
• Data art and critical visualization as inquiry
• Curatorial and archival practices for born-digital and AI-generated works
• Documentation, preservation, and replay: capturing ephemeral web/AI experiences
• Critical making, speculative design, design fiction, and prototyping as argument
• Tool-building as scholarship (datasets, probes, plugins, instruments, browsers, bots)

These clusters are categorized in three broad types: 1) technical, algorithmic, infrastructure; 2) uses, applications, experiments; 3) hybridity, cross-boundary, interdisciplinarity. You will be asked to choose one of these types at the moment of submitting your proposal.

WS.5 welcomes a variety of submission formats, including:

• Full papers: typically articles from 4 to 6 pages (or 3500 words), including references.
• Short papers: typically articles from 2 to 3 pages (or 2500 words), including references.
• Posters: one-page paper (or 500 words).
• Demos and prototypes: one-page paper (or 500 words).
• Panels and roundtables: one to two page paper with the abstract of each intervention (or 500-1000 words).
• Workshops & tutorials: one to two page paper with the abstract of each intervention (or 500-1000 words).
• Artistic, design, and practice-based contributions: one-page paper (or 500 words).

Anonymity

Although the submission form asks for your name/institution, you will be reviewed as anonymous author on a double-blind peer-reviewing basis. Please do not add Author and Affiliation information if you attach a file. If your proposal is accepted, you will then be asked to prepare a final version with your full name and contact details. All submissions that do not respect this line will be discarded from the review process.

Peer-review Process

All submissions will follow a blind peer-review process. At least two different members of the scientific committee will review each paper. The selection criteria is based on originality, accordance to the theme and topics, scientific/technical contribution, and clarity of presentation.

Authors will receive notification of acceptance by mid-June, 2026. If your paper is accepted you will be solicited to prepare the camera-ready version for its publication. The camera-ready papers shall be sent no later than October 4, 2026.

Upon acceptance, at least one of the authors is required to register and present the paper at the conference.

Publication of papers

Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of the conference.