Slides from a talk I gave to the 3rd-year media students at Regent’s University in London a few days ago. Lots of examples from TV and from my own experience. The title was: How Data Can Make You More Creative. The deck contains a framework for understanding the many different types of data available in the TV industry. […]
How to understand Facebook
Joanne Garde-Hansen again: Facebook is a database of users for users; each user’s page is a database of their life. I disagree. Facebook does have a huge database, but it’s how it uses that data that is important. Its real strength is using context to create meaning. Check this out. A user (in this case, my […]
A typology for interactivity in TV
Academics have offered a wide range of definitions of interactivity (Kiousis 2002). I prefer to follow the lead of Cover (2006, p.140) in defining interactivity as occurring when Content is affected, resequenced, altered, customized or renarrated in the interactive process of audiencehood. So an interactive show is defined as one in which the audience directly […]
Programmes as platforms
This post proposes a new approach to understanding how interactivity changes traditional models of TV production. It can be summarised simply: programmes as platforms. A platform is a space into which consumers are invited, where their contributions are solicited and facilitated, and in which collaborative creations can be undertaken for the mutual benefit of the platform […]
How to segment a TV audience
Forty years ago, Gary Alan Fine created the idea of frame analysis to describe tabletop gaming. Frame analysis looks at how engrossed a participant is in the game: 1. The primary frame of the real world, the reference point for all activities 2. The game context, with its rules and structures 3. The fictional world […]
Interactive overload
More interactivity does not = more enjoyment. Somehow the two have been conflated over the past few years, as if every TV viewer, radio listener, newspaper reader and games player had been barely able to contain their enthusiasm to ‘interact’ in some way with the content they were consuming – and as if, thanks to […]
Apophenia
A follow-up to my post on A/B testing being both an art and a science. Here’s another quote from boyd and Crawford: Big Data tempts some researchers to believe that they can see everything at a 30,000-foot view. It is the kind of data that encourages the practice of apophenia: seeing patterns where none actually […]
#DoctorWho and The Norwegian Texters
Espen Ytreberg reports an interview with a Norwegian TV viewer who was describing the experience of sending an SMS and seeing it appear on the TV. Interviewee: It’s great fun… You get that return message, ’Your message will be screened within so and so long’, right? That’s a real kick, you have to try it too. […]
The future of History
Libraries today are full of books. The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford is a fine example – a beautiful library with space for no fewer than 600,000 books. Books are the main way in which we understand the past five hundred years or so. We supplement them with art, architecture, and other physical relics (bits of […]
What is B?
As we enter the age of ‘Big Data’, we’re at risk of excluding ourselves from decision-making a little too hastily. danah boyd and Kate Crawford quote Chris Anderson, ex-Editor-in-Chief of Wired, speaking in praise of what he terms ‘The Petabyte Age’: This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace […]