08-16, 17:00–17:50 (US/Eastern), Tobin
Official ratings of TV viewership and box office revenues for films never tell the whole story of how people access popular media texts and instead promote platforms or corporations. Many millions around the world consume media through unofficial channels, especially peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. In this session, you will be introduced to alpha60, an ongoing research project with six years of TV and film distribution data that reveals trends and oddities in global media desire. The speakers will present data on the quantity, timing, and location of downloads for major television series and films, offering data on unofficial global audienceship and speculating on new insights about cultural circulation, transnational belonging, and fandom.
Abigail De Kosnik is a poet, Jedi princess, and former director of the University of California Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). She is a professor at Berkeley who researches histories and theories of new media, film and television, social media, fan studies, piracy studies, cultural memory, and archive studies. Her methodologies include oral history, data science/digital humanities, discourse analysis, and textual analysis. She is particularly interested in how issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies. She leads the Media Education Research Lab (MERL), which is developing a diversity scoring system for film and television texts, and a toolkit for measuring and mapping peer-to-peer network traffic.
Benjamin De Kosnik got his USR dual standard the old fashioned way, helped run the 2600 meetings in Austin in the 1990s, and is currently an artist and engineer who works on browser performance and web standards at Mozilla. He has a multi-decade involvement with free/open software projects including Gecko, Fedora, GCC, Boost, LSB, and others. In 2017, he cofounded the alpha60 project, which designed, implemented, and continues to operate a super-saturation peer to peer sampler that has been used to sample 491 file sets, consisting of over 80,000 unique files, counting network activity by over 438 million unique users. He hacks TV.
fediverse: @bdekoz@indieweb.social
