Department of English

• Tuesday, April 18, 2023 - 1:00pm to 3:30pm

FBH Graduate Lounge (FBH 330)

Not Your Average Joe: Hollywood’s Data Wars offers a history of how film aesthetics and data science came to be entangled long before the materialization of the phrase “Big Data.” From data-producing technologies like the social survey, community study, public opinion polling, to algorithmic filtering on contemporary streaming platforms, my project highlights critical moments at which spectatorship turned into data points that could be collected and analyzed. What are the social implications of thinking of media production, distribution, and reception as scientific, and even “statistical,” in nature? My project argues that audience research does not benignly gather information but also reshapes identity categories such as race, gender, and citizenship. Moreover, in contrast to previous scholarship that understands “data collecting” as exclusively a methodological or ideological practice, my project argues that developments in dataification can also be read as an aesthetic paradigm. In other words, data science produces surprising aesthetic responses including interdisciplinary criticism and scholarship, disruptive media aesthetics, counter-data initiatives, and counter-storytelling on digital media. Ultimately, this genealogy of data mining bridges conversations in film history and quantitative media theory – all the while providing pertinent interrogations of the possibilities and limitations of “Big Data.”

Committee: Karen Redrobe (chair), Tim Corrigan, Peter Dechereny, Dana Polan (NYU)

The public presentation will begin at 1 pm, immediately followed by a reception.

For those who wish to join via Zoom, please use the following link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/96348614800?pwd=L0tnVFdFZnY1b3orT21seGNNOEhSdz09