Bremen.
The next speaker at the ECREA 2010 pre-conference ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is John Downey, whose view is that comparative media methods are not as well developed as those in the social sciences. We might be able to learn from these other fields.

Comparative media analysis has made little progress in recent time in terms of explaining media phenomena; there is a danger of ethnocentricity, and an overemphasis on normative concerns. Data are often difficult to compare across different frames of research, and the appropriate methodological approaches are disputable; case studies, for example, are approached in a relatively unsystematic manner. Comparative approaches often build on a choice of the ‘most similar’ or the ‘most different’ cases.

Bremen.
The final session at this very enjoyable ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference starts with Felix Ortega, whose focus is on the Iberian and Latin American mediasphere (which increasingly also includes the US, of course).

His research group began by running a questionnaire directed at media experts across a range of Spanish-speaking countries, to identify which research tools and instruments they were currently using. Advanced statistical methods, ranked highly here, along with bibliographical analysis and data work. For non-Spanish speaking researchers, this would look different – there is very little engagement with the wealth of Spanish-language-only research by …

Bremen.
The next speaker at ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, presenting on our Mapping Online Publics research project; this presentation is the methodological part, and I’ll show some more results at the main ECREA 2010 conference later in the week. Our research is part of an ARC Discovery project exploring methods for examining Australian social media use – the aim is to develop methods for computer-assisted cultural analysis. Over the course of the three years, we’ll examine blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Here’s Jean’s Powerpoint, and my transcript is below, too. I’ll …

Bremen.
The next speaker at this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 is Asimina Michailidou, whose interest is in online public opinion formation in the European Union. This is deliberately avoiding an examination of party politics or opinion polls, but rather goes straight to online interaction – in this case, in the context of the EU parliamentary elections in 2009. The focus here was on twelve EU nations as well as a number of pan-European opinion and debate sites.

There are a number of methodological challenges with this – across the three areas of sampling, analysis, and interpretation …

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 starts with Ben Peters, who begins by noting the work of Paul Lazarsfeld as a pioneer of media research methods. Ben’s work focusses on the critical, historical, and international dimensions of networks, and he notes the importance of sharing datasets to the project of building a field of global network studies.

Ben’s research is on studying the failed Soviet attempts to build a domestic Internet-style network around the same time that the US developed ARPANET – while there was substantial expertise available, where the US succeeded …

Bremen.
It’s too early, too chilly, and too foggy for words – but regardless, the second day of the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference to ECREA 2010 is about to begin. The keynote speaker this morning is Tristan Mattelart, whose focus is on audiovisual piracy - and he begins by noting the substantial attention already paid to this phenomenon, though mainly as a for of 'criminal' activity. He notes that there is a difference between Internet piracy and physical piracy (the sale of counterfeit DVDs and CDs), and that there are differences in such piracy between different countries.

We already …

Bremen.
The final speaker for the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference is Miriam Stehling, whose focus is on doing a comparative study of globally traded television formats; she’ll use the Top Model format as a case study. The key challenge here is to understand transculturality: new forms of cultural phenomena that go beyond or across cultures. There no longer is necessarily a congruence between culture and territory, and binary approaches to researching international communication cannot work here; instead, there needs to be a focus on similarities and connections between cultures.

Transculturality, then, requires new methods for empirical research …

Bremen.
The final session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 today starts with Hanna Domeyer, who was briefly my office mate at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg when I visited there a couple of years ago. Her interest is in how media users relate to one another across borders and cultures. Such intercultural communication is to be seen as a special mode of social interaction that may happen anywhere and at any time. So, the research challenge is less in finding new research methods, but in developing a specific research perspective on such forms of interaction.

Media …

Bremen.
The final speaker in this session of the ECREA 2010 ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference is Élisabeth Le, whose interest is in a framework for comparing print and online news media. A first step in this could be to compare newspaper front pages and online news homepages. How do they macro-frame the news – and what are the differences between the print and online versions of the same newspapers, or across different countries?

This can be examined using the concept of substantive frames (focussing on issues/events or political actors); studying language, picture, the combination of language and picture, and …

Bremen.
The next speakers in this ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference session are Tobias Kohler and Jan Müller, whose interest is in the computer-based analysis of television footage from multiple countries. This is part of a larger study into automated TV content processing, covering German, US, Brazilian, and Chinese television content. The material examined here, in particular, are the annual year-end review broadcasts. There are substantial format differences here, of course (in length as well as original placement in the broadcast schedule – German clips are longer stand-alone review shows, while US content was broadcast during news bulletins) …