[Commlist] CFP: Knowledge Graphs and Contemporary Media: Power, Practice, Publics

Baltic Screen Media Review announces a new Call for Papers titled 
“Knowledge Graphs and Contemporary Media: Power, Practice, Publics”

Over the past decade, media have quietly become graph-shaped. Newsrooms, 
streaming platforms, archives, and social networks now depend on webs of 
entities - people, places, works, events - and the typed relations that 
connect them. Under labels such as linked data, the semantic web, and 
knowledge graphs, these infrastructures coordinate how content is 
produced, described, discovered, licensed, preserved, and increasingly 
generated by AI. They sit beneath the interfaces we see, but they 
structure what becomes visible, recommendable, and valuable. 
Understanding contemporary media therefore requires understanding the 
graphs that organise them.

The rise of knowledge graphs in media is not an accident of technical 
fashion; it is the logical outcome of long trajectories in cataloguing, 
digitisation, and platformisation. Libraries and broadcasters moved from 
card catalogues to MARC and Dublin Core; heritage institutions spent two 
decades aligning authority files and opening collections; web companies 
standardised schema-based markup at scale; collaborative knowledge bases 
such as Wikidata turned entity curation into a public good; and 
audiovisual industries confronted the complexity of rights, versions, 
localisations, and windowing across global markets. In parallel, machine 
learning made structured, linked metadata indispensable: entity linking, 
recommendation, search, summarisation, and content moderation all 
perform better when grounded in persistent identifiers and interoperable 
ontologies. To all this was added the trust and provenance crises of the 
synthetic media era, which has led to a renewed emphasis on verifiable 
origin trails, signatures, and content credentials that are most useful 
when they are linked. The economics of attention, the politics of 
authenticity, and the pragmatics of large-scale automation all seem to 
converge on the need for shared, machine-readable meaning.

These developments demand analysis from multiple angles. From the 
political economy of media, knowledge graphs can be read as new 
“coordination layers” that concentrate bargaining power and lock in 
ecosystems - or, alternatively, as public infrastructures that lower 
search and verification costs, widen market access, and enable plural 
discovery. Media industry studies can show how graphs reshape workflows: 
from pre-production knowledge bases and clearance graphs, to versioning 
and localisation, to explainable recommendation pipelines in the 
platform back-end. Media economics can evaluate the intangible asset 
value of metadata itself, model network effects that arise when 
catalogues interlink across firms and borders, and assess when openness 
produces positive externalities and when enclosure yields short-term 
rents but long-term fragility.

For media semiotics, graphs offer a new instrument to study meaning 
circulation: intertextuality, world-building, genre drift, and 
translation across modalities can be traced as patterns of links among 
works, motifs, and characters. Audience and reception studies can 
examine how knowledge graph-grounded explanations and provenance labels 
affect trust and satisfaction, when serendipity expands or narrows 
horizons, and how fan communities co-produce knowledge that later feeds 
institutional graphs. Media archaeology could bring historical depth, 
showing how past documentation practices prefigure today’s ontologies 
and how reconciliation of “lost” entities can revive suppressed or 
minoritised histories. Science and Technology Studies could open the 
black box of standards and maintenance: ontologies are negotiated, 
versioned, and policed by communities; their categories include and 
exclude, often reproducing the centre–periphery dynamics of media culture.

For media law and ethics licensing and rights graphs raise questions 
about privacy and cross-jurisdictional compliance. Provenance frameworks 
aim to restore trust, yet their governance determines who can certify 
whom, under what terms, and at what cost. Finally, a public value 
perspective to media infrastructures asks how these infrastructures can 
be designed as durable, fair, and pluralistic, especially for small 
languages and small markets where linked openness may be the difference 
between invisibility and participation.

This thematic issue takes linked data not as a niche technique but as a 
constitutive feature of contemporary media. We invite contributions from 
all the perspectives discussed above to open up the phenomenon and to 
illuminate the diverse implications that linked data has brought to 
contemporary media.

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

The role of linked data in organizing contemporary media ecosystems.

Governance models for media knowledge infrastructures and their societal 
impacts.

How linked data adoption reshapes news and platform discovery.

How interoperability standards shape collaboration across media 
institutions.

Cross-ID interoperability among broadcasters, archives, and streamers.

Economic consequences of open vs. proprietary media metadata.

Linked data, cultural diversity, and the visibility of small languages 
and regions.

Audience trust and transparency in graph-enabled discovery and curation.

Legal and ethical frameworks for graph-based media production and reuse.

 From catalogues to knowledge graphs: historical trajectories and lessons.

Research methods for studying media with graph-based datasets.

Public value and policy approaches to sustaining linked media data.

Fan wikis as co-curators: aligning community and institutional graphs.

Graph-aware recommenders and explainability in public service media.

Mapping intertextuality and transmedia worlds via entity-relation graphs.

Ontology politics: who defines genres, roles, and identities.

Privacy-preserving linkage of audience data with content graphs under GDPR.

Media archaeology of metadata: reconciling legacy catalogues into RDF.

Event knowledge graphs for breaking-news verification.

Authority alignment between knowledge graphs and cross-border memory.

Knowledge graphs as coordinators in media innovation systems.

Ethical risks of automated ontologies: bias, erasure, contested identities.

The use of graphs for AI training.

Media data spaces (e.g., European initiatives): architectures, 
incentives, and competition effects.

Submission Guidelines

We invite scholars, practitioners, and interdisciplinary researchers to 
contribute original research articles, theoretical essays and industry 
case studies. Submissions should not exceed 8000 words and must adhere 
to the journal’s formatting guidelines. All manuscripts will undergo a 
double-blind peer review process.

- Abstract Submission (400 words) Deadline: October 15th 2025

- Full Paper Submission Deadline: January 23rd 2026

- Publication Date: August 20th 2026

Please submit your abstracts and papers by email to (bsmr/at/tlu.ee 
<http://tlu.ee/>). For any inquiries, contact the editorial team at 
indrek.ibrus/at/tlu.ee <http://tlu.ee/>.

Issue editor: Indrek Ibrus, Tallinn University

The Baltic Screen Media Review is a free-to-publish open-access 
peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the analysis of audiovisual media 
and screen culture, particularly in the Baltic Sea region and its 
surrounding areas. It seeks to address media transformations within 
broader European and global contexts, emphasizing both regional 
specificities and transnational connections. Published by Tallinn 
University's Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, the journal serves as a 
forum for interdisciplinary research, offering insights into film, 
television, new media, and related cultural phenomena. Find out more: 
https://sciendo.com/journal/bsmr <https://sciendo.com/journal/bsmr>

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