Zagreb Conference 2011

First conference of COST Action IS0906:

"New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research". 7-9 April 2011

In partnership with ECREA, IAMCR and ICA

Venue:
University of Zagreb, Croatia
http://www.unizg.hr/homepage/

Final conference programme is available here

Book of abstracts for all presentations can be found here

Download the Conference Information Booklet that helps you to find your way around the conference and around Zagreb.

See the pictures of the conference here: http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu/node/885

Special event on April 7, 2011, 9:00 – 13:00 o’clock: Round Table: Media Audience Research in Croatia: Industry and Academia Synergies with Policy Implications

There will be two roundtable discussions on the 7th of April.

15.30-17.00 Roundtable 1 with non-academic groups: Media literacy: ambitions, policies and measures.

17.30-19.00 Roundtable 2 with non-academic groups: Audience research: academic and non-academic approaches and cooperation possibilities.

Conference topic

The convergence of traditional mass media, computers and telecommunication creates new audiences and new practices. Rapid development results in the turn of the tide from information to communication, from audiences that “read” media material to audiences that produce and interact with media material. Social and cultural changes that intersect with technological changes frame, limit, or facilitate new audience practices.

Traditional media are also responding to the changes. Media content is packaged into new forms and formats that result in new hybrid genres. Content has become less classifiable, and more fluid – and more controversial, for example, regarding social networks and content-sharing websites as YouTube.

In light of the ongoing technological developments that create new audience practices as well as altered content structures, new challenges emerge for audience research, and they are most notably apparent in the need for innovative research methods.

Apart from methodological innovations triggered by new media, developing methods is also necessary in the context of traditional media: Triggered by the ongoing dialogue between research traditions, as well as by the changing processes and contexts of audience actions, new approaches and creative combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods are needed.

This COST conference deals with emerging issues in audience research and its methodology:

- What are the shortcomings of conventional research methods and what are the needs for innovative approaches? Where do we need to stick to conventional methods? While interviews and focus groups have afforded some insights to qualitative researchers, and surveys have provided quantitative information, audience researchers now need new tools to understand the increasingly complex media environment that people engage with every day.

- Cross-media contents and convergent technologies, for instance, question single-media approaches to reception and use, and ask for new approaches that fully recognise the many types of media with which people engage every day and are significant as a whole. Also, audience practices are increasingly diversified and dispersed over time and space, raising important methodological and practical problems to audience researchers.

- What are the practical opportunities offered by Web 2.0 tools for audience research methods? Web 2.0 technologies are not only challenging objects of study, they are also new instruments that can help researchers to better understand and chart audience/user practices. Indeed, Web 2.0 tools can facilitate access to and communication with research participants, as well as the sharing of research materials (photos, videos…). For instance, this can help in studying global issues (such as the worldwide reception of globalised media materials) and identities (as reflected by users’ online productions). Yet, Web 2.0 technologies raise important methodological and practical problems (inequality of access to the Internet, obstacles to proper identification…) that also need to be thought about.

Organizational issues

Draft program

Thursday, April 7 (location: Campus Borongaj)
15:30-19:00 Roundtables with non-academic groups
1: Media literacy: ambitions, policies and measures

2: Media industries and applied audience research

20:00 Get together & registration

Friday, April 8 (location: Campus Borongaj)
08:00-09:00 Registration
09:00-18:30 Conference
20:00 Social event

Saturday, April 9 (location: Campus Borongaj)
08:00-09:00 Registration
09:00-18:30 Conference
20:00 Social event

Sunday, April 10 (location: Faculty of Political Science)
09:00-13:00 Action members only: Working group meetings

Locations:
Campus Borongaj: Department for Croatian Studies (Hrvatski studiji), Borongajska cesta 83D.
Faculty of Political Science (Fakultet političkih znanosti), Lepušićeva 3.

Organization

For the local organizers:

Dr. Jelena Jurisic
University of Zagreb, Croatian Studies
Borongajska cesta 83D,
10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Email jjurisic@hrstud.hr

For the COST Action:
Prof. Dr. Helena Bilandzic
Augsburg University, Department for Media and Educational Technology
Universitätsstr. 10
86159 Augsburg, Germany
Email helena.bilandzic@phil.uni-augsburg.de