[Air-L] CFP Innovative Methods for VOD Research

[Karin van Es]

Dear colleagues,

We would like to draw your attention to the following call for
participation in an international workshop on Innovative Methods for
Video-On-Demand Research at Utrecht University (NL) on 12 September 2024 (a
special journal issue is planned following the workshop). We look forward
to receiving your abstracts by 1 May 2024.

Please feel free to share the CFP with other colleagues. Thank you.

Best,

Karin van Es (Utrecht University)
Ramon Lobato (RMIT University)


*CFP Innovative Methods for Video-on-Demand Research*
An international workshop at Utrecht University, 12 September 2024

Video-on-demand services (VODs) are often assumed by researchers to be
black boxes, impenetrable to academic inquiry. Data on catalogs, audiences,
and usage can be challenging to source and may be commercially protected,
leading to concerns about transparency and access (Wayne 2022).

Nonetheless, in recent years researchers have found many innovative
workarounds to investigate VODs, publishing important studies of VOD
libraries, recommendations, promotion, and use. This scattered but vibrant
field of empirical VOD research now spans television and screen studies,
media industry studies, platform studies, law, economics, computer science,
and policy research. We see for instance advances in catalog research
(Grece 2018), distant readings of VOD interfaces (Kelly 2021), reverse
engineering of algorithms (Pakovic 2022), logging user interactions through
browser extensions (Castro et al. 2021), and quantitative analysis of
proprietary data sets from third-parties (Lotz et al. 2022). Such research
is valuable for scholarly debate because it allows us, in the absence of
industry disclosure, to better understand trends in production,
distribution and consumption of content; and from a policy perspective, it
is also vital to establish if local content quotas and requirements for
prominence/visibility are being met.

Topics of interest within VOD research include:

   - What makes up the library of a VOD?
   - How do libraries differ between services and across space and time?
   - How is content circulated? (interfaces, recommendations and promotion)
   - What do we know about usage of different VODs?
   - How is usage shaped by promotion and discoverability within the
   interface?
   - What VOD content is popular/culturally significant?
   - How are data used by VODs for producing and distributing content?
   - What can VOD research contribute to public policy debates?

We invite papers that propose, modify, elaborate, demonstrate or reflect on
innovative methods for studying VODs, including empirical methods for data
collection and/or critical and interpretive methods for data analysis. Our
focus is on research methods for subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and
broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) services, rather than on social video
platforms such as YouTube and Tiktok.

*Submission details:*

Abstracts of 500 words are due by 1 May 2024 along with a 100 word bio and
should be sent to Karin van Es (K.F.vanEs at uu.nl) and Ramon Lobato (
ramon.lobato at rmit.edu.au).

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 1 June, and accepted authors
will be invited to submit extended abstracts of 2,000 words by 5 September.
The workshop will be held on 12 September at Utrecht University, The
Netherlands. A special journal issue is planned following the workshop.