[Air-L] CFP "Big Data Audiences" Special Issue of Convergence (Due: March 31)

[Jennifer Hessler]

Deadline for Abstracts: 31st March 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 <https://journals.sagepub.com/home/con>*

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
<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
July 31st 2024, with a target publication date of August 2025.

Link to CFP here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/con/Final_Big%20Data%20Audiences%20
CFP%20Convergence%20(4)%20(1)-1709697529.pdf
<https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/con/Final_Big%20Data%20Audiences%20CFP%20Convergence%20(4)%20(1)-1709697529.pdf>