[Commlist] CFP Qualifying Digital Data for Media and Audience Research

*CFP Qualifying Digital Data for Media and Audience Research*

13^th and 14^th December 2021, hybrid seminar, DCA, Roskilde University (DK)

With talks by *Lev Manovich* (City University of New York, USA) and 
*Simon Lindgren* (Umeå University, Sweden)

The research group /Audiences & Mediated Life/ is pleased to invite 
contributions for a hybrid seminar that seeks to qualify digital data 
and computational tools for the study of media and audiences.

The aim of the seminar is to identify the challenges and opportunities 
of using digital data for media and audience researchers. The move 
towards digital methods has brought a host of new tools to the media and 
audience researcher, such as co-occurrence analysis, network analysis or 
sentiment analysis, that consider digital data as ‘big data’, aka. data 
of high volume, velocity and variety (Kitchin, 2014).

These digital data can potentially allow different and novel 
understandings of media and their audiences (Zeller, 2014), but can also 
be somewhat descriptive, a-theoretical and taken out of context. As 
Manovich (2011) reminds us, we should be wary of taking digital data as 
transparent representations of what people think and do. This can be 
illustrated by Kormelink & Meijer (2018), who showed how measures of 
clicks are poor indicators of interest for news. From an audience 
perspective, theoretical frameworks to make sense of digital data do 
exist, such as the “small act of engagement” or SAE framework (Picone et 
al., 2019), but consider only the qualitative dimension of these data. 
Hybrid “data theory” (Lindgren, 2020) is therefore called for.

/Qualifying/, in the context of this seminar, suggests two related 
meanings. First, it is an invitation for the rationales and principles 
of qualitative research to enrich the study of digital data via 
computational methods. Second, it suggests that digital data needs 
better qualification to be suited to the work of media and audience 
researchers. Hence, this seminar aims to answer two questions:

 1. How can qualitative research inform and qualify digital data for the
    purpose of media and audience research?
 2. How can digital data obtained via computational tools contribute to
    the work of the qualitative researcher?

We welcome contributions in the form of cases study, method 
experimentation, re-use of existing empirical material, theoretical 
reflection, literature review, etc. that make explicit the continuity, 
points of rupture and development that ‘big’ digital data have with 
existing theories, methodologies, fieldwork or data regarding a definite 
question or area of interest in media and audience research.

*Programme and deadlines*

The two-day seminar takes place on December 13^th and 14^th 2021 at 
Roskilde University, Denmark, but also partly online via Zoom. This CFP 
invites contributors to present at the seminar either in person or via 
Zoom by sending an abstract of 300 words to (mathieu /at/ ruc.dk) 
<mailto:(mathieu /at/ ruc.dk)>no later than November 15th. Notice of acceptance 
will be provided shortly thereafter. On the second day, a ‘data walk’, 
entitled “Doing reception analysis with digital data” and aimed at media 
and audience researchers, is organized for on-site participants only. 
Participation at the seminar is free, whether on site or remotely, but 
places to the data walk are limited.

The seminar will be associated with the preparation of a journal special 
issue on the same theme. Participants to the seminar will be considered 
for inclusion in the special issue, but this does not imply a final 
invitation to publish. An announcement concerning the special issue will 
be made at the seminar.

*
*

*Monday Dec 13^th *

11:00 to 12:15 Talk by Lev Manovich (hybrid)

12:15 to 13:15 Lunch (on site only)

13:15 to 14:45 Paper session 1 (hybrid)

14:45 to 15:15 Break

15:15 to 16:45 Paper session 2 (hybrid)

*Tuesday Dec 14^th *

10:00 to 11:15 Talk by Simon Lindgren (hybrid)

11:15 to 11:30 Break

11:30 to 13:00 Paper session 3 (hybrid)

13:00 to 14:00 Lunch (on site only)

14:00 to 17:00 Data walk (on site only)

17:00 to 17:15 Goodbye (on site only)


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