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Thesis Info

LABS ID
00947
Thesis Title
Redefining the Anthology: forms and affordances in digital culture
Author
Giulia Taurino
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
Ph.D.
Year
2020
Number of Pages
University
University of Bologna; University of Montreal
Thesis Supervisor
Veronica Innocenti; Marta Boni
Supervisor e-mail
Other Supervisor(s)
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
Media Studies and Visual Arts
Copyright Ownership
Languages Familiar to Author
URL where full thesis can be found
amsdottorato.unibo.it/9365/
Keywords
media studies; digital humanities; platform studies
Abstract: 200-500 words
In recent years, television studies intersected with interdisciplinary topics as a consequence of the implementation of digital technologies in the production and circulation of content. In addition to favoring the emergence of a network of infrastructures, the digital has come to stimulate new debates, theories and methodologies among media scholars. Among others, streaming platforms invite us to reconsider concepts like platformization, digitalization, algorhythmics and other terms that became part of a renewed vocabulary for the humanities. Reasoning on the complexities and entanglements of digital technologies and the world wide web, this dissertation tackles the spreading of internet-distributed television through the lenses of platform studies. Starting from a genealogy of the anthology model, the present research explores forms of content organization inherited from pre-digital practices, as they transitioned to digital culture through evolutionary processes and technological disruptions. This dissertation accounts for the digital turn in media studies, and reconsiders how the Internet impacted human communication and activities at all levels of making and spreading culture. To further explore evolutions in the context of television, I examine the anthological turn, a phenomenon that requires a discussion on the concept of “anthology” first and foremost as a cultural form presenting a set of affordances, but also as a practice, a model, a process. Finding themselves at the crossroads between television histories and the digital, contemporary anthology series serve as links to media traditions (i.e. literature, radio), as much as they act as medium-specific entities in the definition of classificatory systems on online platforms. Drawing upon a post-modern and post-structuralist perspective, this research project ultimately focuses the complex relation between the anthology form and its potential functions or uses, industrial and social spheres, temporal continuities/discontinuities, techno-cultural transitions, while contributing to frame the coexistence of linear and non-linear environments in the contemporary mediascape. Overall, this research project answers the following questions: can the concepts of form and affordance be usefully integrated in digital media studies? If so, what is their intersection with anthologization processes? What are the affordances, functions and uses of the anthology form in the digital age? On the one hand, this project investigates the ways certain narrative structures typical of the anthology form emerge in the context of television seriality, starting from specific conditions in the media industry. On the other hand, it offers a broader reading of the very interaction between anthological editorial practices and algorithmic-driven recommendation systems. While focusing on the evolution (temporal, historical dimension) and on the digital circulation (spatial, geographic dimension) of the anthology form, this work outlines the following: (i) structural and narrative-oriented affordances; (ii) industrial affordances; (iii) pragmatic and ecological affordances. By doing so, I propose a comparative approach to the anthology as an interpretationally primitive concept, one that is at the same time cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-genre and accounts for both pre- and post-digital practices of cultural content organization.