Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

1H
Digital Audiences (Chair, Stuart Cunningham)
Toija Cinque
Data Visualisations – representing the digital audience
Across contemporary entertainment, “gossip” is a constant feature and flows across a range of interfaces.
The use of high-speed broadband and internet-enabled television sets (smart TVs) for movies, news,
documentaries, and television programs, amongst other services—for the convenience of the
listener/viewer at a time chosen by them (on-demand)—is vital to television’s survival through networked
options. Individuals engage with a variety of increasingly interconnected technological devices. Moreover,
user-generated content streamed online is proving popular for a number with photo and video sharing social
site, Snapchat possibly the next big threat to not only TV but to Google and Facebook both. More recent
predictions with reference to live television events, however, would see social media being particularly
reinvigorating, especially from the perspective of audiences. In this talk then, I will explore today’s
mediascape with particular reference to the HBO series Game of Thrones. I will present data visualisations
that represent key spaces for discussion and commentary about such television programs in the context of
the increased ubiquity of distribution platforms in which most of our daily activities and routines are carried
out with the help of various forms of communication technologies via cloud computing and social
networking.
Tessa Dwyer
Barrage Cinema, Bullet Subtitles and Online Video Sharing
In August 2014, China trialed “Barrage Cinema”, bringing real-time audience annotations into the movie
auditorium. Using smartphones, cinema audiences SMS or live-tweet (using Weibo) comments that are
overlaid on the screen as running text. With large numbers of people simultaneously firing short text missiles
or bullets, the movie screen transforms into an interactive interface. Text crosses its surface at a pace
determined by the scale of the messaging activity, creeping further downwards to obscure more of the
image area as additional people join in the conversation. This interactive cinema phenomenon has
developed from social video sharing known as “danmaku”, and a specialty mode of interventionist
fansubbing termed “tucao”. Examining these emerging modes of digital engagement, this paper reflects
upon the increasing centrality of text, subtitles and language play within current screenscapes, noting new
aesthetic paradigms and possibilities.
Sean Redmond The Affect of Eye Tracking: Contour Mapping Digital Viewers
Eye tracking technology is very much data driven: it produces visualisations that locate and aggregate where
viewers have looked, for what length of time, and in what ocular relay. In one very real sense eye tracking
divorces emotion from the viewing process since it captures gaze patterns only. Nonetheless, one can make
inferences about feeling and emotion through these data visualisations, and moreover, one can understand
the visualisations as forms of contour maps, three dimensional in nature, with an affective geography
contained within or across them. Eye tracking isn’t simply or singularly a quantitative measurement but an
affective one, involving the visual realization of the viewer’s haptic engagement with the text. In this talk I
will explore this idea of haptic visualization through looking at the data to the television series, Sherlock, and
the film, Black Swan. My contention is that affective relations emerge in and through the visual maps found
in eye tracking data. This points towards a new type of digital viewer set within the new cultural landscape
of augmentation.
1I
Television publics and cultures (Chair, Eric Maigret)
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