For the 10th ECREA conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to take place from 24-27th September 2024, members from our PSM-AP team will present as part of a panel titled Comparative Approaches to Public Service Media Disruption: The Transformation of Values, Norms and Prevailing Structures in the Age of Platforms as well as the round table Re-conceptualising the television ‘text’ for the platform age: textual analysis, texts and interfaces.
Chaired by our principal investigator, Catherine Johnson, the panel will consist of Hanne Bruun, Julie Mejse Münter Lassen, Catalina Iordache, Antonio Nucci, Serra Tinic, Michal Głowacki, Filip Świtkowski, and Dan Martin. As this presentation will be at the half-way point of our three-year project, when we have undertaken most of the primary data collection, the panel will showcase the different forms of analysis possible by bringing together our multi-level and cross-country comparative approach.
The round table will consist of project members Julie Mejse Münter Lassen, Tim Raats, Catalina Iordache, and Dan Martin, with Catherine Johnson once again the chair. The aim of the roundtable is to stimulate and contribute to debates about the conceptual and methodological challenges and approaches required to understand and examine television as a text in the context of the rise of streaming and global video-on-demand platforms.
Our panel will take place on Thursday, September 26th from 14:30-16:00 and the round table will take place Friday, September 27th from 13:30-15:00.
The Panel – Comparative Approaches to Public Service Media Disruption: The Transformation of Values, Norms and Prevailing Structures in the Age of Platforms.
The first paper during the panel will be presented by Hanne Bruun and Julie Mejse Münter Lassen. Titled Navigating dilemmas and striking a balance: PSM VODs and personalisation practices in five markets, the paper provides a cross-country comparison of the use of personalisation within PSM video-on-demand (VOD) services. Focusing on a single method – a distant reading of the interfaces of four case study PSM VOD services that utilise personalisation – enables this paper to examine the factors that shape the very different ways in which personalisation is enacted within each service.
The second paper, titled Balancing the scales between public service algorithms and editorial curation, will be presented by Catalina Iordache and Catherine Johnson. As public service media shifts to digital-first strategies, challenges are raised for reaching public remits, and particularly principles of universality, accountability, and diversity. Taking a multi-method approach to examine the discourses and practices of two countries – the UK and Belgium – the paper focuses on ‘public service algorithms’ aimed at countering threats of polarisation and the creation of filter bubbles, while engaging with audiences.
Antonio Nucci and Serra Tinic will deliver the third paper on the panel, titled Analysing Inclusion in Italian and Canadian PSM. Drawing on analysis of policy documents, interviews and interfaces, this paper interrogates why CBC (Canada) and RAI (Italy) take very different approaches to the value of ‘inclusion’. Taking into account the similarities and differences between the two countries, the paper aims to answer what is meant by “inclusion” by the two PSMs and how does this term find its practical application on their VOD services?
Following this, members from our Polish team, Michal Głowacki and Filip Świtkowski, will discuss the societal and political polarisation surrounding public service media in Poland. In a paper titled Reinventing Polish PSM for the Age of Platforms: Qualitative Approach to a Transitional Case Study, they will focus on the case of Telewizja Polska (TVP) as a transitional case study, and how discussions have centred around societal polarisation rather than modernisation of PSM regulation and organisation.
The final paper in our panel will be delivered by Dan Martin, with the title Representing PSM Values in the Platform Age: Comparative Analysis of Programmes across Markets. Returning to a single method, cross-country analysis, the paper focuses on the question of how to undertake highly qualitative textual analysis of programmes comparatively across the six case study countries represented within our project.
The Round Table – Re-conceptualising the television ‘text’ for the platform age: textual analysis, texts and interfaces.
Drawing from projects experimenting with different methodological and conceptual approaches to understanding television in the age of platforms, this roundtable aims to stimulate wider discussion and debate about how we conceptualise the television ‘text’ and what this might mean for the methodological approaches required to study television in the platform age. The roundtable will begin by discussing the various methodological challenges of analysing the interfaces of VOD services. It will debate what questions we should be asking through interface analysis, interrogate the value of qualitative and quantitative approaches, explore the challenges of addressing personalisation, and discuss the extent to which such analysis requires collaboration with computer scientists in order to understand the impact of algorithmic recommender systems.
With the increased globalisation of television, it becomes increasingly important to develop methods that seek to understand these processes at a transnational level, whether to explore the differences between national versions of transnational services (such as Netflix) or to examine nationally specific responses to transnational phenomena (such as platformisation). To address this, the roundtable will examine the challenges of undertaking comparative textual analysis of interfaces and programmes at scale (Pietaryte and Suzina 2023). It will debate the benefits and challenges of bringing textual analysis of interfaces into dialogue with other qualitative methods, such as interviews and document analysis, including the challenges of data overload and achieving a balance between explanatory relevance and contextual equivalence when researching across different national case studies. Finally, it asks how we might utilise textual analysis of both programmes and interfaces as a comparative method at scale. To what extent is a method typically focused on close reading of a small number of texts adaptable to the demands of larger-scale cross-country comparison?
Further ECREA Details
To hear our panel and round table, as well as those presented by others, join us in Ljubljana in September 2024. The keynote speakers for the event are Vesna Leskošek and Jelena Kleut.
To learn more about the ECREA 2024 conference ‘Communication & social (dis)order’, including details about registration and travel, visit https://ecrea2024ljubljana.eu/.
The preliminary programme for the event is now available at https://c-in.floq.live/event/ecrea2024/Landing.