[Commlist] CFP "Big Data Audiences" Special Issue of Convergence

[Extended] Deadline for Abstracts: 7 April 2024
Deadline for Full Papers: 31st July 2024
Expected date of publication: August 2025

Big Data Audiences

Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research
into New Media Technologies

Guest Editors: Jennifer Hessler (North Carolina State University, US)
and Elliot Montpellier (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, CA)

Media ecosystems increasingly use big data audience insights to shape
their distribution models, content production and curation, and
marketing strategies, even while these developments are happening at
different paces and with varied cultural and political implications
from country to country. Existing scholarship on audience datafication
largely takes a media economics approach, focusing on how data is
informed by and shapes the actions of media industry stakeholders.
This often elides the cultural stakes of audience datafication.
Crucially, this issue brings together analysis of institutional
structures with insights from critical sociologies of data to grapple
how the big datafication of audiences converges with issues of
cultural identity and exchange.

This issue contends with the way big audience data practices are
changing entertainment media ecosystems. Proposals might engage with
how the implications of audience datafication are playing out
differently in state-run, public, and commercial television systems,
or how the increasing reliance on big data audience insights impacts
the distribution of capital among creatives. At the same time, the
issue engages with how big data is changing the way audiences
are imagined and attributed value. Media distributors often spin the
addressability afforded by big data as an opportunity to personalize
content more effectively for globally diverse viewers. However,
proposals might engage with how big data can limit the audience
experience, or how the vastly scaled and real-time-actioned ways of
addressing audiences also reify the distortions via which racial,
gendered, national, and other inequalities manifest.

We are especially interested in proposals that focus on the global
south, and those that ground data in specific uses or consider data
across sites from political, industrial, ethnographic, STS,
anticolonial, or other approaches. Possible topics could include, but
are not limited to:

• How relationships between industry stakeholders are reconfigured via
new practices of audience datafication.

• The way that policies or funding models shape how audience data is
collected or used.

• Theoretical treatments of data colonialism, surveillance, and
platform capitalism in relation to big data audiences.

• The computational methods that are being used to imagine audience
communities, or the conceptual frameworks that can be used to
understand how big data addresses audiences.

• The impacts that big data audience analytics have on national,
gendered, LGBTQ, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other
communities.Please send a 500-word abstract and a 100-word bio for
each author to the guest editors at

(bigdataaudiences.cnmt /at/ gmail.com) by March 31st 2024.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be contacted by the guest editors
and will be invited to submit full paper contributions (8000-9000
words) by 31st July 2024, with a target publication date of August
2025.

No author processing charges required.
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