creativity/machine

Help: Who is researching YouTube?

One of my current research projects is a collaboration with Joshua Green from the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. We’re designing a large-scale content analysis of YouTube, with the rather ambitious long-term aim of mapping the emergent genre system of the network.

Part of the planning involves figuring out whether or not our intended project legitimately fills a gap in knowledge, and how we might build on, learn from, or at least acknowledge what’s already being done. Unsurprisingly, there has been very little published research on YouTube to date, but as I know from doing some work on Flickr, there’s bound to be a lot of research underway.

So, if you or anyone you know is doing any research on YouTube that might be related or relevant and you don’t mind swapping some info, we’d love to hear from you! If you have any leads, please leave a comment here, or if you’d prefer, email me directly.

jeanburgess

10 responses to “Help: Who is researching YouTube?”

  2. I did, Glen, but thanks for reminding me. I don’t recall anything substantial that was specifically related to YouTube, but will check through the archives.

  4. Try posting this query on the AoIR mailing list. I’d be surprised if you didn’t get some responses there.

  5. Yep, posting to several email lists is on my list of things to do (will have to re-subscribe to AoIR though – it kind of got too much for me a while back). BTW, feel free to pass this query on through your own networks…

  6. A colleague from Catholic University (Chiara Fonio) in Milan is working on a content analysis of YouTube video. Her interest, anyway, is mainly sociological. This is an excerpt of the project description.

    “In order to understand new visual cultures of pregnancy and birth, one cannot fail to consider the impressive number of videos tagged with the words “pregnancy”, “birth” and “ultrasounds”. We aim at analyzing this contemporary phenomenon both by examining many videos, and by emphasizing the shift from birth as a private experience to parturition as a “networked event” potentially shared with anyone.”

    We will present this work as a sample of user generated content analyis during a conference in Septermber.