The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.
Arnt’s project conducted surveys and interviews with professionals in the Norwegian music industry. Almost half of the survey respondents use music metrics in their jobs, but such use is …
The next speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is my colleague Kim Osman, presenting outcomes from our research project in collaboration with The Conversation and the Cooperative Research Centres Association in Australia. We are interested in assessments of the public value and impact of scholarly work, which are also increasingly demanded by the governments that fund scholarly research. Slides here:
Increasingly, platforms like The Conversation as well as social media are also critical to the engagement with and impact of scholarly research, and there has been a rise in the development of scholarly …
It’s Thursday morning, and after the fabulous opening keynote by Bronwyn Carlson last night the AoIR 2019 conference at QUT in Brisbane is now getting started properly. This morning I’m in a panel on metrics in journalism, academia, and music that begins with a paper I’ve been involved in, and which my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals will present. The slides are here:
Our key question here is whether journalism metrics are trustworthy enough to be used in editorial decision-making. This is part of a larger project on the future of journalism in a post-journalism …
Rafael Grohmann from the Brazilian blog DigiLabour has asked me to answer some questions about my recent work – and especially my new book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is out now from Polity –, and the Portuguese version of that interview has just been published. I thought I’d post the English-language answers here, too:
1. Why are the ‘filter bubble’ and ‘echo chamber’ metaphors so dumb?
The first problem is that they are only metaphors: the people who introduced them never bothered to properly define them. This means that these concepts might sound sensible, but that they mean …