[ecrea] cfp: New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research

CALL FOR PAPERS

New challenges and methodological innovations in 
European media audience research

First conference of the COST Action IS0906:
Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies
in partnership with ECREA, IAMCR and ICA
University of Zagreb, 7-9 April 2011

The convergence of traditional mass media, 
computers and telecommunication creates new 
audiences and new practices. Rapid development 
results in the turn of the tide from information 
to communication, from audiences that ?read? 
media material to audiences that produce and 
interact with media material. Social and cultural 
changes that intersect with technological changes 
frame, limit, or facilitate new audience practices.

Traditional media are also responding to the 
changes. Media content is packaged into new forms 
and formats that result in new hybrid genres. 
Content has become less classifiable, and more 
fluid ? and more controversial, for example, 
regarding social networks and content-sharing websites as YouTube.

In light of the ongoing technological 
developments that create new audience practices 
as well as altered content structures, new 
challenges emerge for audience research, and they 
are most notably apparent in the need for innovative research methods.

Apart from methodological innovations triggered 
by new media, developing methods is also 
necessary in the context of traditional media: 
Triggered by the ongoing dialogue between 
research traditions, as well as by the changing 
processes and contexts of audience actions, new 
approaches and creative combinations of 
qualitative and quantitative methods are needed.

This COST conference calls for submissions that 
present and reflect research methods and methodological issues such as:
- What are the shortcomings of conventional 
research methods and what are the needs for 
innovative approaches? Where do we need to stick 
to conventional methods? While interviews and 
focus groups have afforded some insights to 
qualitative researchers, and surveys have 
provided quantitative information, audience 
researchers now need new tools to understand the 
increasingly complex media environment that people engage with every day.
- Cross-media contents and convergent 
technologies, for instance, question single-media 
approaches to reception and use, and ask for new 
approaches that fully recognise the many types of 
media with which people engage every day and are 
significant as a whole. Also, audience practices 
are increasingly diversified and dispersed over 
time and space, raising important methodological 
and practical problems to audience researchers.
- What are the practical opportunities offered by 
Web 2.0 tools for audience research methods? Web 
2.0 technologies are not only challenging objects 
of study, they are also new instruments that can 
help researchers to better understand and chart 
audience/user practices. Indeed, Web 2.0 tools 
can facilitate access to and communication with 
research participants, as well as the sharing of 
research materials (photos, videos?). For 
instance, this can help in studying global issues 
(such as the worldwide reception of globalised 
media materials) and identities (as reflected by 
users? online productions). Yet, Web 2.0 
technologies raise important methodological and 
practical problems (inequality of access to the 
Internet, obstacles to proper identification?) 
that also need to be thought about. Submissions 
may deal with methodological reflections, but 
also present studies illustrating innovative 
methods. Apart from individual submissions, panel 
proposals of 4-5 individual presentations in a 
coherent context are also welcome.

Please send abstracts of 250 words max. 
(excluding references) via email to the 
organizers ((jjurisic /at/ hrstud.hr); 
(helena.bilandzic /at/ phil.uni-augsburg.de)) with the 
subject line ?COST conference Zagreb?. 
Submissions should contain a title page with the 
title of the presentation (in case of panel 
submissions: title of the panel and titles of the 
presentations), names and contact data of all 
authors. Please send one document containing 
title page and abstract in a word file, and be 
sure to remove all author identification from the 
abstract itself, as proposals will be submitted into blind peer review.

Deadline for submission is January 15, 2010.

The abstracts will be submitted to blind peer 
review; participants will be notified about 
results by February 28, 2011. Accepted abstracts 
will be considered for a full paper publication.

Organization:
For the local organizers:
Dr. Jelena Jurisic
University of Zagreb, Croatian Studies
Borongajska cesta 83D,
10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Email (jjurisic /at/ hrstud.hr)

For the COST Action:
Prof. Dr. Helena Bilandzic
Augsburg University, Department for Media and
Educational Technology
Universitätsstr. 10
86159 Augsburg, Germany
Email (helena.bilandzic /at/ phil.uni-augsburg.de)

For more information on the COST Action 
?Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies?, 
see http://www.cost.eu and http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu.

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