Material not available: ‘Sharing’ audience research

Abstract

By weaving together reflections from other disciplines – particularly data studies, future studies and design research – this contribution aims to function as a starting point to imagine alternative ways of sharing audience research. The understanding of ‘sharing’ put forward here highlights that audience research, at its core, is a practice of care and collaboration, and raises questions about how different publication forms and formats correspond to this. By extension, this challenges us to (re)consider what we invest our energies in. If our main avenues of sharing audience research are individually authored summaries of findings and results, we might be missing an opportunity for not just critical reflection on the state of the field of audience research but also an opportunity to engage more meaningfully with each other’s work. This contribution is part of the Cultural Commons special issue on ‘Energy! The Power of Audience Research as Field, Practice and Critique’, edited by Joke Hermes, Linda Kopitz and Helen Wood.

As a standard in many author information forms – including the one sent out by the European Journal of Cultural Studies – the question of whether or not ‘data’ exists, and whether or not ‘data’ can be made available, can be shared, connects to a larger question of what audience research does. Are the interviews we conduct, the posts we crawl, the focus groups we lead, ‘data’? Other than more or less accessible data repositories, required by international funding bodies as part of ‘open’ policies, there seems to be a hesitation in audience research to think about the materials we collect beyond individual articles and publications. Even though we might now always (prefer to) to think of our materials in this way, I suggest that, as audience researchers, we do collect data and do create datasets – if in maybe more messy and material ways than the term ‘data’ might imply – and would collectively benefit from at least pausing when answering the question about something to share. Inspired by calls to both conceptualize data and/as material and ‘look closely and concretely at data and what we can learn from it’ (Schneider and Hagener, 2023: 359), this contribution proposes an idea of ‘sharing’ to unfold dimensions of care across the interconnected practices of collecting, analysing and publishing material in and of audience research. The starting point for this thought experiment is the emerging format of the ‘data paper’: Drawing on methodological approaches from the digital humanities, data papers outline the process of collecting, structuring and analysing data – which frequently also features reflections on challenges and difficulties in working with data in the humanities. The dataset itself, in the spirit of open scholarship, can in many cases be accessed via research repositories, with the explicit invitation to other researchers to also work with the collected material. This opens up the possibility for different authors, at different times and from different angles, to approach the ‘same’ material – and offer new interpretations. Undoubtedly, both the themes and topics covered in data papers and the type of data available are, generally, somewhat different from what qualitative audience research in cultural studies does (and looks like).

What this contribution explores, then, is whether the principles at the heart of the ‘data paper’ – a reflective engagement with the research process and a conscious sharing of the research materials for collective and collaborative (re)use – could be adapted to audience research, and how this might connect to this special issue’s focus on energy. Alexandra Schneider and Malte Hagener suggest to think about writing, editing and publishing data papers as an ‘ongoing experiment to explore our fields of expertise and the formats we critically reflect and communicate in and about our research’ (2023: 361). This idea of exploration and experimentation could also be extended to think about ways to share audience research materials as data beyond the (by now established) format of the ‘data paper’. In many ways, this resonates with conceptualizations of cultural studies as a project shaped by and centred on ‘openness, uncertainty and radical doubt’ (Kay, 2024: 250) – and audience research within this project as a site for inquiry. While focused on forms of publication, the idea of ‘sharing’ audience research laid out here closely links to larger conceptualizations of ‘the commons’ as a verb rather than a noun (cf. Berlant, 2016). By weaving together reflections from other disciplines – particularly data studies, future studies and design research – this contribution aims to function as a starting point to imagine alternative ways of sharing audience research.

Audience research is, by default, a shared endeavour. Engaging with how audiences make sense and make meaning requires what Joke Hermes and I have elsewhere called ‘being invited in’ (Hermes and Kopitz, 2024): As audience researchers, we are dependent on viewers, users, producers, participants, willing to share their ideas and practices and experiences with us. Our ‘data’ then also need to give justice to these actors – and offer spaces for both recognition and reflection. In their conceptualization of ‘Futures Research’, Sarah Pink and Juan Francisco Salazar highlight that ‘as anthropologists our stance is to never be the expert. Instead, we learn about and with other people’s expertise, accredit this expertise to them as collaborators in shared endeavours’ (2017: 16). Acknowledging the interconnections between anthropology and cultural studies, a similar understanding of collaboration extends to audience research across disciplinary boundaries. In the context of research materials and/as data, this is also a political move in urging for an understanding of data beyond ‘extraction’. The idea of collaboration in doing research also links to questions of sharing research after our interviews are transcribed, our netnographic materials collected, our surveys filled out. The majority of the contributions in this Cultural Commons special issue are co-authored, pointing to an existing network of collaborative thinking and writing across our different academic contexts. Notably, these co-authorships were not our editorial idea but rather suggestions by the authors themselves to think about ‘new energies in audience research’ by placing energy into collaboration and conversation. In this contribution, and with a nod to the aforementioned format of the ‘data paper’, I am wondering whether this could be pushed further towards other forms of ‘sharing’.

Starting from the often criticized and yet remaining emphasis on the ‘new’ and ‘more’, sharing allows us to (re)consider what we invest our energies in: Instead of analysing our own materials, what would happen if we collaborate across the boundaries of disciplinary, institutional, academic settings? As a field that is used to (re)inventing itself, audience research might look different yet again if we not only make ‘data’ – interviews, transcripts, field notes, posts and threads and tweets and comments – available, but actively encourage others to reflect on and work with ‘our’ material. While concerns about privacy and protection of the participants of different forms of audience research are, of course, valid, maybe these concerns become the ‘default’ answer for why this is not possible a little too easily and too quickly. Slowing down, as Joke Hermes also suggests in her contribution to this special issue, also takes on meaning on multiple dimensions here. Instead of collecting new material, what would happen if we return to material collected weeks, months, years ago? If ‘data hold lived experiences’, as Helen Wood has phrased it in a comment on an earlier draft of this contribution, a slower and more reflective approach also becomes a way to historicize not just everyday-meaning making as a practice but also audience research as a discipline – something we rarely do, rarely have time for, in chasing the new. Beyond countering an academic climate of acceleration (cf. Berg et al., 2017), this return could also function as a challenge to care more about the material we are collecting – and not just about what we want to say about it. Instead of writing another book, another article, another conference paper, what would happen if we consider alternative ways of sharing knowledge? If research as a form of probing – rather than proving – ‘involves active engagement with ambiguity and instability’, ‘implies both a curiosity and a situated context for that curiosity’ and ‘requires engagement and experience’ (Lutsky and Burkholder, 2017: n.p.), adopting a sense of playful acceptance of ambiguities as it comes to our materials might function as an encouragement to invite alternative readings and resistances – rather than reference to ‘definite’ answers.

Publishing formats like the Cultural Commons section are becoming increasingly rare – and with them, spaces for discussion, for debate, for reflection, for an ‘imaginative engagement’ with current questions (as the open call for the section phrases it), become fewer and fewer. Academic applications for grants as much as positions are still mostly centred on individual achievements, on academic ‘output’ and ‘impact’ measured in numbers and metrics, citations and indexes, rankings and references. Neither informal forms of collaboration – like comments and feedback shared among colleagues on ideas and early drafts – nor formalized forms of collaboration – like editorial work – are registered and recognized systematically. If our main avenues of sharing audience research are individually authored summaries of findings and results, we might be missing an opportunity for not just critical reflection on the state of the field of audience research but also an opportunity to engage more meaningfully with each other’s work. And we might be missing an opportunity to create – and protect – what the Care Collective calls ‘caring communities’, ‘localised environments in which we can flourish: in which we can support each other and generate networks of belonging’ (Care Collective et al., 2020: 45). Formats like Cultural Commons, in spite of this alternative framing – or maybe precisely because of it – require time and energy, by authors, by reviewers, by editors, by readers. As you read the introduction to this special issue of such reflections – as well across the individual contributions – you might notice that we have added explicit notes to the people taking on these tasks: Not just as an attempt to visualize hidden labour but also to underline our appreciation for the shared energies of collaborative thinking, researching, writing. Here, I return to the format of the ‘data paper’ as it is emerging in the digital humanities: One of the key features of these shared publications is a reflection on the ways that the data was collected – the choices made and the challenges encountered. Arguably, this reflection not only highlights the contributions of different participants (including but extending beyond the authors) and at different points in the research process. Reflecting, publicly, on choices and challenges also holds the potential to openly engage with possibilities and failures, conceptually and methodologically. Adapting such an openness – and vulnerability – not only takes away some of the implicit or explicit, actual or assumed, pressures on research and us as researchers but also allows for conversations to emerge about what to do differently in the future. ‘Sharing’, in this understanding, is deeply interwoven with ideas of collaboration and care – and resonates with audience research’s ‘orientation towards inquiry’ (Hermes, 2024: 47).

In many ways, and maybe not surprisingly, the suggestions outlined here about sharing audience research do not ‘work’ in a neoliberal system that is ‘uncaring by design’ (Care Collective et al., 2020: 10). Beyond the question of when our material can be considered ‘data’ and what we might be able to do (differently) with ‘data’, audience research itself is seemingly becoming datafied to fit into the logic of a system that, quite often, simply does not care. And yet, if imagining ‘is fundamental to our ability to understand alternative visions for collective life’ (Dunn, 2018: 375), thinking about – imagining – how audience research could be shared, and shared differently, opens up lines of resistance. Precisely because ‘collaboration sits uneasily with a highly individualized and competitive performance culture’, as Lavinia Brydon and Victoria Pastor-González (2021: 87) suggest, centring collaboration rather than competition is an act of care – and maybe also a return to the central concerns of cultural studies as a collective project. Particularly when confronted with an uncaring academic landscape, the colloquial ‘sharing is caring’ takes on a new dimension in the always changing field of audience research.