Konferenzbeiträge auf der ICA 2019 in Washington

Auf der Jahrestagung der International Communication Association ICA vom 24. - 28. Mai 2019 in Washington, D.C. (USA) ist der Lehrstuhl Kommunikationswissenschaft, Schwerpunkt Digitale Kommunikation dieses Jahr mit dem Paper "The quest of building meaningful audience networks" vertreten, welches mit einem Top Faculty Paper Award der Mass Communication Division ausgezeichnet wurde.

Mangold, F. & Scharkow, M. (2019). The quest of building meaningful audience networks. Reconsidering and renewing the research agenda.

Are audiences fragmented and polarized? Essential to contemporary communication research, this question has been increasingly studied using an audience network approach originally introduced by Webster and Ksiazek (2012) and lately criticized by Mukerjee et al. (2018a) on methodological grounds. This paper contextualizes and augments the discourse about building audience networks by arguing that the approach needs to be reconsidered not only methodologically, but also in light of contemporary research on media repertoires. We revisited the state of audience network research to derive a renewed agenda for future studies. Capturing crucial intersections between communication theory and communication methods, the agenda introduces five key challenges for building meaningful audience networks beyond the present approaches: 1) building weighted audience networks using 2) correlational weighting schemes, 3) further incorporating the two-mode structure underlying all audience networks (i.e., user-medium relations), 4) building stratified audience networks, and 5) using multivariate individual-level media use data.

Überdies ist Prof. Dr. Michael Scharkow auf der ICA 2019 Preconference 'Expanding Computational Communication: Towards a Pipeline for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars' mit einem Impulsvortrag zum Thema Teaching Computational Methods vertreten.