MEDIA MUTATIONS 13. Audiovisual Data: Data-Driven Perspectives for Media Studies

Bologna, Dipartimento delle Arti – DAMSLab, October 6th-7th, 2022

MEDIA MUTATIONS is an international conference on contemporary audiovisual media hosted by the Department of the Arts of the Università di Bologna. The event has now reached its 13th edition. This year's focus is on datafication of audiovisual media content and audiences, and on data-driven methods and methodologies for the study of films and TV series.

Quantitative perspectives applied to narrative audiovisual texts and consumption have not been absent in the history of film and media studies, but they have often been received with some resistance from proponents of more traditional approaches. However, in recent years, influential researchers’ initiatives have highlighted both an opportunity to explore the potential of these studies and a gap between the possibilities of digital data and computational tools and their application in media studies. Nowadays, as data analytics and artificial intelligence strategies have gained importance in many areas of the media industries, the number of data-driven studies has also increased and gained traction in the academic debate and in the wider field of film, media, and sound studies. Indeed, several methodological lines of inquiry have been developed to discover patterns, trends, or characteristics of audiovisual products, such as processing textual objects through multimodal approaches, social discursivity through automated software, or evaluating production and consumption processes through social network analysis and modeling techniques. All these research projects are based on specific tools for the collection and analysis of audiovisual media data through statistical and modeling tools. Drawing on these considerations, the conference aims to bring attention to and promote discussion on systematic methods to conduct data-driven research in film and media studies. The conference intends to be an opportunity both to investigate what we can do with data, and the analytical and interpretative possibilities at stake, and to reflect on what data can be (and what kind of data we must deal with), to problematize the possible limits of such approaches to the study of audiovisual narrative media.

Speakers include Massimo Scaglioni, Director of the Research Centre for Television and Audiovisual Media, that on Friday, 7^th October at 4.00 pm will present the paper 'What can we do with data? Quantitative approaches on audiovisuals supply and consumption in the age of convergent media'.

MEDIA MUTATIONS 13 | Call for Papers
MEDIA MUTATIONS 13 | PROGRAMME