Media Mutations 13

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

Organized by Giorgio Avezzù (Università degli Studi di Bergamo) and Marta Rocchi (Università di Bologna)
In collaboration with Mirko Degli Esposti (Università di Bologna) and Guglielmo Pescatore (Università di Bologna)

The international conference Media Mutations, in its thirteenth edition, focuses on datafication of audiovisual media content and audiences, and 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.


FULL PROGRAMME
Thursday, October 6th

14:00 Institutional greetings
Roberta Paltrinieri (DAMSLab Scientific Coordinator, Università di Bologna)
Guglielmo Pescatore (Università di Bologna, Associazione Media Mutations)
Introduction
Giorgio Avezzù (Università degli Studi di Bergamo)
Marta Rocchi (Università di Bologna)

14:30 Panel 1: Automatic content analysis (chair: Gustavo Marfia)
Machine acts: Collaborative screenplay writing with GPT-3
Tobias Frühmorgen (Lusófona University – Filmuniversität Babelsberg), Vincent Thornhill* (LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven), Veronika Romhány* (LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven); *presenting authors
Looking for lexical signatures in Gomorrah
Maurizio Naldi and Paola Dalla Torre (Università di Roma LUMSA)
Finding the invisible: Locating subliminal frames using Cinemetrics and Python
Juan José Caballero Molina (University of Barcelona), Endika Rey Benito* (University of Barcelona), Javier Sanz Aznar* (University of Barcelona – Universitat Pompeu Fabra); Anna Tarragó Mussons (University of Barcelona); *presenting authors (online)
The use of cultural anayltics as a methodological movement to dig out the layers of the videogamegraphic images
João Ricardo Bittencourt and Gustavo Daudt Fischer (UNISINOS) (online)

16:30 Panel 2: Gender, inequality, and data activism (chair: Giulia Allegrini)
Unsuitable jobs for women: A mixed methods approach to analyse women’s behind-the-scenes employment and women’s on-screen representations in Italian TV crime drama
Valentina Re and Marica Spalletta (Link Campus University)
Constructing an open, participatory database on gender inequality in the Italian film industry: Methodological challenges
Mariagrazia Fanchi, Matteo Tarantino and Rosa Barotsi (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
Women in Polish TV series: Qualitative and quantitative analysis
Andrzej Meler and Beata Królicka (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)
Documenting the invisible: How data activism fills visual gaps
Miren Gutiérrez (Universidad de Deusto)
Representations of disability in children’s television programmes: A critical analysis
Gïti Hatef-Rossa (Universität Trier)


Firday, October 7th

09:30 Keynote speech (online)
Data-driven analysis of televisual characterisation: A corpus linguistic approach
Monika Bednarek, Professor in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia

10:45 Panel 3: Industry professionals (chair: Luca Barra)
AI Assisted Music Creation: Is the problem solved
Francois Pachet (Spotify) (online)
Rethinking creative production synthesised
Yates Buckley (Unit9)
How data are changing the rules for the broadcasters
Gianluca D’Innocenzo (RTI-Mediaset)

14:30 Panel 4: Media industries (chair: Roy Menarini)
The turn towards data intelligence: Creative and commercial decision-making in the film industry
Roderik Smits (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) (online)
Discussing streaming platforms as analytical objects
Mads Møller Tommerup Andersen (Københavns Universitet)
Adopting a cultural data analytics approach for data-driven media research: A study of digital b2b platforms as facilitators of public value creation in the audiovisual industries
Vejune Zemaityte*, Indrek Ibrus, Andres Karjus, Ulrike Rohn, Madis Järvekülg, MaximilianSchich (Tallinn University); *presenting author

16:00 Panel 5: Consumption and reception (chair: Paola Brembilla)
Predicting streaming audiences for a channel’s on-demand TV shows: Choice architecture, consumer agency, and content attributes
Neil Thurman* (LMU Munich), Antonia Klatt (LMU Munich), Harsh Taneja (University of Illinois), Hritik Raj (University of Illinois); *presenting author
What can we do with data? Quantitative approaches on audiovisuals supply and consumption in the age of convergent media
Massimo Scaglioni (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)
Queer and mainstream: Analyzing the reception of Heartstopper via digital tools
Marta Boni (Université de Montréal)
The reception of Italian medical dramas online
Stefania Antonioni and Dom Holdaway (Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo)

17:45 Closing remarks