Researching Media Platforms: A Research Methods Conversation

Researching Media Platforms: A Research Methods Conversation

Presented by Dr Angela Wu (New York University)

Date: Friday 10 August, 2018
Time: 9:30am-11:00am
Location: Seminar Room, Level 4, Forgan Smith Tower, UQ St Lucia

Abstract:

In this roundtable Dr Wu will step participants through a number of her Platform media projects and the mixed methods she deployed in them. Her methodologies draw from media studies, science and technology studies, cultural sociology, and network science. She has deployed these with respect to research on (1) data analytics and algorithmic cultures, (2) web use and digital infrastructures, and (3) information technology, politics, in post-reform China. In the process she has analysed clickstream data to illuminate the infrastructural dimensions of online media;  proposed a new user-centric imagery of the WWW that foregrounds local usage and its shaping forces; investigated the contrasting patterns of online news usage among millennials and boomers through a relational analysis of shared usage obtained from metered usage data; integrated access blockage with cultural factors to explain Chinese web user behaviour in the context of the “Great Firewall” of China; and combined semantic network clustering and critical discourse analysis of Weibo websites from 2011 and 2016, to reveal, historically and macroscopically, the relative dominance of differing ways of evaluating regime legitimacy on the Chinese Internet.  This Roundtable will be chaired by Prof Tom O’Regan and Dr Dan Angus.

Presenter:

Dr Wu is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities where she is working with Dr Nina Li on “Provincializing the Chinese Internet”. Her UQ visit is supported by the HASS Strategic Research Fund initiative, “Platform Media: Algorithms, Accountabiliy and Media Design” and IASH. She gave a keynote presentation last week to the Communication, Culture and Governance Symposium in China and East Asia symposium jointly organised by IASH and QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre. Dr Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication in New York University.  

This seminar is supported by the UQ Digital Data and Society Network, the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences @ UQ, The Platform Media SRF and IASH. This seminar is part of the “Visual Social Media” stream of the “Platform Media: Algorithms, Accountability and Media Design” project,  a Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences initiative that brings together researchers in the School of Communication and Arts and the T.C. Beirne Law School.