Media and communications research at Tallinn University Baltic Film, Media, Arts, and Communication School (BFM)

and Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT)

If you'd like to keep up with what MEDIT is doing, please click here to receive future newsletters. 

NEW RESEARCH PROJECTS

New research project on public value generation in datafied culture production networks

Indrek Ibrus together with the team (including Maximilian Schich, Ulrike Rohn, Andres Kõnno, Christian Ritter and Alexander Norta) won a PRG grant from Estonian Research Council (for one year only, but with good opportunities for extending it by 5 years). The project is titled “The Public Value Chains of Cultural Open Data Solutions”. It studies the complex ways in which cultural open data solutions could produce 'public value'. In conceptual terms it builds on Mark H. Moore's and Mariana Mazzucato's work on public value, links these to our work on innovation systems in creative industries and investigates how new open data technologies such as the Semantic Web and blockchain could be seen as conditioning the emergence of new innovation systems, how they provide new tools for understanding the functioning of the related public sphere and of industry systems and how public value is produced within these systems. The work in this project will be both empirical as well as applied, aimed at designing and testing new cultural open data management systems with various parties. The project is highly international (studying multiple case studies across the world) and interdiscplinary (combining network science and data analytics with media and innovation economics, anthropology, information systems design and others).

QUEST continues...

MEDIT's team (Arko Olesk and Berit Renser) has been contributing to the Horizon 2020 project QUEST (Quality and Effectiveness in Science and Technology Communication), developing quality indicators for the evaluation of science communication content. You can read more about the indicators and the Tallinn team activities within the project from these blog posts:

• In science communication, don’t keep your distance (once the isolation is over) 
• How to improve science communication? Consider these 12 guiding principles 
• One set of indicators to rule them all? Evaluating the quality of different science communication formats 

Arko Olesk also presented the QUEST results at the session "Rethinking Science Communication: Science Stories in Perspective" in EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) on September 4.

ScreenME is about to start

Ulrike Rohn and Birgit Rosenberg have been preparing the launch of the new ScreenME-Net,  a network of international partners that MEDIT leads with a H2020-Widespread/Twinning grant.
 
Through the ScreenME-Net, MEDIT will build up and improve its competencies in screen media entrepreneurship scholarship. The partners in the project are Jönköping International Business School in Sweden, LUT University in Finland, Aarhus University in Denmark, Technische Universität Ilmenau in Germany, Vrije Universitet Brussels in Belgium, and Cork Institute of Technology in Ireland. The online kick-off event that introduces the activities of the network for the next three years will take place on February 4-5, 2021. More information will be published on the MEDIT webpage in due course. 
Save the dates! 

FORTHCOMING BOOKS

On the Digital Semiosphere: Culture, Media and Science for the Anthropocene

John Hartley, Indrek Ibrus, Maarja Ojamaa.

Book abstract says:

"It is only since global media and digital communications became accessible to ordinary populations – with Telstar, jumbo jets, the pc and mobile devices – that humans have been able to experience their own world as planetary in extent. What does it mean to be one species on one planet, rather than a patchwork of scattered, combative and mutually untranslatable cultures? One of the most original and prescient thinkers to tackle cultural globalisation was Juri Lotman (1922-93). On the Digital Semiosphere shows how his general model of the semiosphere provides a unique and compelling key to the dynamics and functions of today's globalised digital media systems and, in turn, their interactions and impact on planetary systems."

Indrek Ibrus, Marek Tamm and Katrin Tiidenberg edited a small book of essays titled (in translation) “Estonian Digital Culture Manifesto” ("Eesti digikultuuri manifest”, Tallinn University Press). 2020 was announced a ‘digital culture year’ by the Estonian Ministry of Culture and related to that Indrek Ibrus, Marek Tamm and Katrin Tiidenberg edited a series of essays in the Postimees newspaper. At the end of the year they compiled the published essays into a small book and wrote themselves the final conclusive manifesto that proposes a variety of policy development directions for Estonia in relation to digital culture. The book will be published in the next few weeks both as an Open Access online publication and a printed book.

MEDIT PEOPLE

Katrin Tiidenberg was awared the Estonian Science Communication award

and 
organized Association of Internet Researcher’s (AoIR) 2020 annual conference Life (Online) 

BFM's co-professor of participatory culture Katrin Tiidenberg received the Estonian Science Communication Award in October - the Estonian Science Communication Award in the category of Science and technology communication via audio-visual and electronic media.

Congratulations, Katrin, we are proud!

Recipient's recent interview on "Social Media - Communication Environment, Attention Economy or Manipulation Machine?" can be seen on TLU's broadcast “Ekspert eetris”

Katrin Tiidenberg took also an active part of the team organizing the Association of Internet Researcher’s (AoIR) 2020 annual conference Life (Online) (27 - 31.10.2020). 
AoIR, as many other organizations, had to suddenly pivot because of the pandemic and decided to organize an all online conference, utilizing a series of innovative approaches to allow the members to benefit from discussions, share their ideas, but avoid Zoom fatigue. The conference was a triumph, with nearly 800 registered participants. The AoIR 2020 team is currently writing up their approach and lessons learned to share with other associations seeking to replicate this success.

PhD STUDENT MAR CANET’S WORKS ON EXHIBITION 

"POSTCards from Lanzarote" is an audiovisual piece which consists of two videos of 18 minutes exhibited in the group exhibition Veintinuevetrece in Lanzarote from 9th to 21st November. The audiovisual piece was made by Varvara & Mar and it has used AI generating to generate the visual material. The sound we had collaborated with two sound artists (Adrian Rodd and Taavi Varm). We invited a Spanish artist Adrian Rodd to create the audio for the video to inspire in the natural landscapes of the island. And we invited an Estonian sound artist Taavi Varm (Misutron) to create the audio of the image of the island related to tourism. The video generated with AI is latent space navigation which is the topic of research of Mar Canet.

Links to sniped  videos of the pieces:

• POSTcard Landscapes from Lanzarote I - Snippet
• POSTcard Landscapes from Lanzarote II - Snippet

Moreover, Mar has had other artistic presentations recently:

• Art X Neuroscience —— NeuroKnitting Beethoven: Interactive Concert Installation Hong Kong (Performance - Presentation) Video Hong Kong premier 14th November. On November 27 there was a new performance in Nabi Center in Seul that was also advertised in the Estonian major news programme Aktuaalne Kaamera on November 25.

• ENA - Experimental theatre with an AI bot in Milano Theater in collaboration with director Roger Bernat. 

MEDIT REPORTS

Estonia’s Digital Culture report

A couple of years ago, the Estonian Ministry of Culture announced that 2020 would be the ’year of digital culture’. While this kind of labelling is a tool for raising public awareness, it is also about creating trends and initiating policies. A report on the state of art in Estonia’s digital culture services, institutions, forms and policies is one of the outcomes of this campaign. The report was commissioned from MEDIT and was mostly authored by Andres Kõnno. It will be published at the very end of 2020.

The report focuses on the qualitative aspects of digitization of culture in Estonia and presents different viewpoints to the issue: (a) of the public sector; (b) of the private sector; and (c) of NGOs representing various interest groups. But tells also stories: for instance of the recent successes of the Estonian videogaming industries, and of policy initiatives supporting effectively media literacy, language technologies, and digital archiving. But there has also of stories of failures and disappointments with regard to e-books, music, and taxing the internet giants. 

The report on the state of art in Estonian digital culture will be available early January of 2021.

Besides, Andres Jõesaar and Andres Kõnno have recently provided the 

Estonian report to the Global Disinformation Index: see "Media Market Risk Ratings: Estonia" 

CREATIVE LAB

This Autumn, Creative Lab started cooperation with a new private-sector driven animated film project. Creative Lab experts help the animators to capture motion for 3D animation. Creative Lab new collaborations also include joint operations with other universities. For instance, Creative Lab coordinates and is the creative force behind the virtual  tour of TalTech Mektory. This project involves also TLU students from BFM and the School of Digital Technologies (DTI). In addition, Creative Lab has started to work closely with DTI EDUSPACE lab.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN CHEKHOV’S FOOTSTEPS

MEDIT’s research fellow Liina Keevallik has been trying to use robots to generate and produce theatrical plays from the beginning of the year. Now the moment has come to let the robots step on the stage. In December the first experiment will take place in VITA blackbox.

The Project ROBOT THEATRE tries to teach a robots to produce plays, starting from writing a script and ending with a performance both directed and played by robots themselves. Performing arts have flirted with the idea of using AI before, but as for text-based theatre, the results have not been very consistent so far.

There are two reasons why this was attempted now by Liina and the team that both relate to the fact that Czech writer Karel Capek coined the word “robot” in a play that premiered in 1921. This means that 1) “Robots” are born to make theatre not to clean floors; 2) “Robot” will be a 100 years old in January and this has to be properly celebrated. The biggest and the most ambitious aim of the project is to make the machines think and act creatively – to make them to produce rhetoric figures. Engaging Chekhov’s plays that observe human nature “through the microscope”, are of great help in this matter.

The teaser made by ELU students!

The interdisciplinary project brings together professionals and students from different fields – machine learning algorithm development has been carried in collaboration of the Tartu-based data analytics company STACC; performing arts platform e¯lektron.art 

has helped with engineering solutions for performing arts; research contributions have come from scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds - Indrek Ibrus, Pia Tikka, Ermo Säks (BFM/MEDIT), Jaagup Kippar (DTI), Janika Leoste (HARI); EDUSPACE lab has provided  the robot motors and helps with programming the “actors”. 35 students have annotated the plays as well as organised the necessary databases - this work has been invaluable.

The project has thus been marked by a close cooperation between artists, scientists and local private sector companies.

The scenic experiment in VITA blackbox will take place on Dec 21-22, 2020; the entire performance will most probably premiere in May 2021.

BSMR Vol 8  IS OUT!

The new 2020 issue (vol 8) of Baltic Screen Media Review, available both online and print in mid-December, focuses on how the COVID-19 global pandemic has affected the audiovisual cultures. With contributions ranging from leading scholars in media studies to early career sholars, this BSMR issue will begin mapping how the rapid spread of the virus has acted as a catalyst in contemporary audiovisual media. Articles focus on topics that range from magazine covers of socio-political magazines and art house cinema to the flexibility of public broadcasting in the small states of Europe and the quest for dominance of the streaming giants, among many others.

NEW PEOPLE

NEW COLLEAGUES:

NEW POSTDOCTRAL FELLOWS:

Dr Vejune Zemaityte is a Research Fellow in Cultural Data Analytics at the CUDAN Open Lab, working as part of the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School. She uses data analysis and visualisation to study global cultural and creative industries, focusing on cinema and gender. Her work is interdisciplinary, data-driven, and industry-facing. Vejune is interested in the movement of cultural products through time and space. During her PhD study at Deakin University in Australia, she analysed global film distribution trends using big data on theatrical screenings. Vejune is also passionate about researching diversity in cultural and creative industries, such as content, origin, and gender diversity. A branch of her work at CUDAN deals with gender inequality in film production in different countries using social network analysis. Vejune performs research collaboratively with the CUDAN team as well as other research groups around the world, including the Kinomatics. She also collaborates with external partners to produce research that has high social impact and a potential to advance cultural policy. Vejune is always seeking new academic and industry partnerships and thus encourages potential collaborators to get in touch.

Dr Daniel Chávez Heras has been working with moving images and computers for over ten years. He specialises in social and cultural machine vision, in particular critical computational aesthetics, an approach to the study of audiovisual culture that cuts across the arts and sciences through creative computing and interdisciplinary design. 

One of the most visible examples of this approach was his collaboration with a small team of developers, engineers and producers from BBC R&D to create “the world’s first broadcast AI-TV programme”: Made by Machine: When AI Met the Archive (2018). The programme was seen by nearly half a million people in the UK, and was nominated for a Broadcast Tech Innovation award. Daniel is interested in establishing similar types of cross-disciplinary collaborations with audiovisual archives, repositories and digital platforms, to jointly develop novel media formats and research practices.

Daniel was educated in Mexico and the UK, he holds a first degree in Design, from Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, an MA in Film Studies, and a PhD in Digital Humanities —both from King’s College London. He will be the postdoctoral fellow starting from Jan 1 at the Cultural Data Analytics Open Lab (CUDAN), through the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication at TLU.

NEW DOCTORAL STUDENTS:

Conferences attended July-Dec

Katrin Tiidenberg 

moderated the Youth Monitoring webinar “Unopened aspects of youth life” at the beginning of the year, which can be viewed HERE!

Katrin also gave presentations at the following academic events:

• the Estonian Geoinformatics Society’s (EstGIS)  summer academy “Digital culture and space” on August 14.

• Stanford University / Stanford Ethnography Lab, Symposium Platformed Creation: The World of Influencers, Content Creators and Micro-Celebrities, “What is social media influence.”  You can watch it HERE!

• British Sociology Association, "Sex and Social Media", 3.12.2020 

• IDA, Intimacy in Data Driven Culture, The problem with sex in social media, “Sex and Platform Power”, 4.12.2020 

Ulrike Rohn joined the Scientific Advisory Board for Leibniz ScienceCampus Postdigital Participation , which is an interdisciplinary research partnership that focuses on societal participation in today’s ‘postdigital’ world.

Ulrike also participated in an expert panel on the current state of the media industry, organized by the International Media Management Academic Association (IMMAA). The recordings of the talk and some of the key statements made can be found HERE!

During autumn, Ulrike Rohn in her role as President of the European Media Management Association chaired a series of expert panels that addressed different issues, including: How to best teach media management; how to best bridge theory and practice; and where to publish media management research papers? The recordings of the talks can be found HERE!

Pia Tikka’s recent keynote speeches include:

Tikka P. Enactive virtuality as the common playground of cinema and game narratives. In Session Sci-Art, Gaming and Cinema. International conference DIMENSIONS in XR, organised by SWISS SOCIETY of VIRTUAL, AUGMENTED and MIXED REALITY, Oct 30, 2020

Tikka P.  Narrative contextualisation: Overriding the artificiality of Artificial Humane Agents. organised NordiCHI 2020,  Tallinn University. Oct 28, 2020.

Tikka P.  Virtuality by enaction: Imaginary worlds beyond technology, transdisciplinarity in Science and Arts - Capes PrInt Symposium organised by the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM, Brazil), Oct 21, 2020.

Tikka P. Neurocinematics. Invited speaker at Neuro 2.0- Futuristic Trends in NeuroTechnology by NeuroTechX.org, Oct 18, 2020.

and Pia’s recent artistic installation:

The State of Darkness, biofeedback VR experience was presented in the public exhibition of the Transdisciplinarity in Science and Arts - Capes PrInt Symposium organised by the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM, Brazil), Oct 21, 2020.

Vejune Zemaityte gave a talk on December 3 “Cultural Data Analytics and Cinema”at Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (LMTA), Vilnius, Lithuania.

Indrek Ibrus was an invited speaker at the symposium “Industry, Policy, Impact: Stuart Cunningham’s project”. The online symposium took place on November 26th and was organised by the Queensland University of Technology’s  Digital Media Research Centre. 

Indrek Ibrus gave also a talk at TEDx Tallinn that took place on September 26th. Indrek’s talk was titled “Mediatizing Education - is it an Opportunity?”.

PUBLICATIONS

Chavez Heras, D. and Blanke, T., (2020). On machine vision and photographic imagination. AI & SOCIETY, pp.1-13.

Indrek Ibrus, Teet Teinemaa (2020) The Changes that COVID-19 Catalysed for Audiovisual Industries, Baltic Screen Media Review, 8 (1), pp 2-10 [forthcoming]. 

Keerdo-Dawson, Michael (2020) Marriage, adultery, and sexuality (unelided) in Tuesday, After Christmas, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 11:3, 292-306, 

DOI: 10.1080/2040350X.2019.1709290

Nielsen Daniel and Nanì, Alessandro (2020). The Moral Economy of User Created Content in the Digital Game Industry. G/A/M/E The Italian Journal of Game Studies. 8(1) [forthcoming]

Mathieu, David; Schrøder, Kim Christian; Bolin, Göran; Runnel, Pille; Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Pille; Nanì, Alessandro and Theodoropoulou, Vivi (2020). Stakeholder Collaboration in Audience Research. Baltic Screen Media Review 8(1), pp 112-125 [forthcoming]

Arko Olesk (2020) “Estonia. Science communication in a post-Soviet country”

in Toss Cascoigne, Bernard Schiele, Joan Leach, Michelle Riedlinger, Bruce V. Lewenstein, Luisa Massarani, Peter Broks (Eds.). Communicating Science: A Global Perspective”, Australian National University Press. pp 279-2976.

Tiidenberg, Katrin (2020). A wormhole, a Home, an Unavoidable Place Introduction to “Metaphors of the Internet”. In: Markham, Annette; Tiidenberg, Katrin (Ed.). Metaphors of Internet, Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity (15−27). New York, Bern, Berlin: Peter Lang. (Digital Formations).10.3726/b16196. 

Tiidenberg, K., Gammelby, A.K., Olsen, L.M. (2020). Agential hysterias: A practice approach to embodiment on social media. (Eds) Katie Warfield, Crystal Abidin, Carolina Cambre, Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media, Bloomsbury Academic.

Tiidenberg, Katrin (2020). NSFW as an Intervention: the case of sexy selfies on tumblr. In: Allison McCracken, Alexander Cho, Louisa Stein, and Indira Neill Hoch (Ed.). a tumblr book: platform and cultures. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Open Access!

Elen Lotman (2020). Pedagogical Experiment With Portrait Lighting in Combination With Different Actor's Intent in the Case of Novice Actors. International Journal of Film and Media Arts, 5 (2), pp 49-65

Tikka, Pia (2020). Simulatorium Eisensteinense: Eisenstein’s legacy in art and science. Naum Kleiman. EISENSTEIN FOR XXI CENTURY. Moscow: Garage. Published.

Tikka, Pia (2020). Enactive virtuality: from generative to emergent narrative systems. In: Hosana Celeste Oliveira, Maria Rosa Chitolina, Nara Cristina Santos (Ed.). Transdisciplinarity in Science and Arts - Capes Print Symposium. Brazil: PPGART-UFSM Publishing [Accepted/reviewed/Forthcoming 2021].

Tikka P.  Narrative sense-making in the service of health – a neurocinematic approach. In Mette Hjort and Ted Nannicelli (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value. Wiley-Blackwell Press. [Accepted/reviewed/Forthcoming 2021].

Verhoeven, D., Moore, P.S., Coles, A., Coate, B., Zemaityte, V., Musial, K., Prommer, E., Mantsio, M., Taylor, S., Eltham, B., Loist, S., & Davidson, A. (2020). Disciplinary Itineraries and Digital Methods: Kinomatics and the Industrial Geometry of Global Cinema Scholarship. NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, 9(2).

Human Development Report now also available in English (Arko Olesk and Indrek Ibrus chapters)
The Estonian Human Development Report 2019/2020 won the prize with the best clear message in the Estonian Clear Message competition.

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