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The concept of witnessing has been used to explore the construction of evidence and experience in settings of law, religion, atrocity, media, history and science. Recent research has examined how digital technologies may multiply the involvement of remote, non-present and unanticipated actors in the witnessing of events. This paper examines what digital data practices at Amnesty International’s Decoders initiative can add to the understanding of witnessing. It introduces the notion of ‘data witnessing’ with reference to four projects on (i) witnessing historical abuses with structured data from digitised documents; (ii) witnessing the destruction of villages with satellite imagery and machine learning; (iii) witnessing environmental injustice with company reports and photographs; and (iv) witnessing online abuse through the classification of Twitter data. These projects illustrate the configuration of experimental apparatuses for witnessing injustices with data. In contrast to accounts which emphasise the presence of an individual human witness at the scene, Amnesty’s data practices are conspicuously collective and distributed, rendering the systemic scale of injustices at a distance, across space and time. Such practices may contribute to research on both (new) media witnessing and data politics, suggesting ways in which care, concern and solidarity may be constructed, structured, extended and delimited by means of digital data.

The term “paratext” was coined by Gerard Genette in his 1987 book Seuils, translated into English in 1997 as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Writing of literature, Genette used the term to...

Audience measurement data are increasingly central to what many media corporations produce, yet much of these data are inaccessible to scholars. I therefore argue that cultural studies is in need of an audience studies revival. Fan studies continues at strength, but a wider range of audience studies is required to counter and to interrogate the occasional proclamations that companies such as Netflix, Facebook, and Google share with us about audiences and users.

Malawi presents a fascinating case study for global media flows: a country full of American product, with much of it there because of an informal economy, and, conversely, little of it there because of any effort on Hollywood's part to develop Malawi as a market. This article therefore draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Malawi during the summers of 2008 and 2010 to examine the circulation of foreign film and television and to detail a form of media mobility through piracy.

A new approach to land capability assessment, termed soil and land constraint assessment, has been developed and carried out over an area of 60,000 km2 along the NSW coast and in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment in eastern NSW. The system allows for the generation of soil and land constraint maps that portray in detail the physical potential of the land to support a range of land uses, including standard residential development, agriculture and domestic wastewater disposal. It involves a semi-quantitative analysis of soil-landscape constraints such as erosion, flood and mass movement hazards, and includes a broad indication of potential costs necessary to overcome these constraints. The system has been extensively field tested and was found to be reliable in approximately 80% of sites, with a tendency to give conservative results (i.e. indicate higher constraints than actually present). It is recommended for broadscale planning only and not site-specific development control. Twenty of the 34 stand...

This article argues that thinking of media/cultural/communication/etc. studies as entertainment studies might help the field break through numerous impasses, (1) moving beyond medium specificity, (2) honestly embracing the fact that we study entertainment, (3) forcing us to contextualize contemporary entertainment within broader histories of entertainment, (4) asking of us to examine news and ads as entertainment, and (5) analyzing that which does not entertain alongside that which does.

This article argues for the importance of studying promos. First, it is noted that promos often begin the text, offering viewers their first understandings of and encounters with the text. Second, promos' role in creating notions of the channel as a whole and these notions' role in contextualizing our understanding of any given text are examined. Thus, while promos have often been regarded as annoying hype at worst, or as secondary and peripheral distractions at best, the article argues that they frequently make vital contributions to the production of television's textuality.

This article interrogates the Americanization/cultural imperialism thesis’ presumptions about the textual encoding of “America” by examining the semiotics and reception of notions of America in the global hit television program, The Simpsons. While in recent years, the cultural imperialism thesis has been both questioned and revised from a variety of angles, often the key assumption remains that all American cultural products are encoded with a uniform and chauvinistic attitude that promotes America as a nation and culture, and that champions contemporary American capitalist values. This article examines both the text of The Simpsons and its reception by a group of international viewers, showing how, contrary to many of its televisual colleagues, one of America's most globally successful television products may actually be circulating a parodic-satiric suspicion of America and American capitalist values.

This paper examines televisual parody as a media literacy educator, and the potential of parody to channel the powers of comedy and entertainment in order to “teach” the techniques and rhetoric of televisual texts and genres. It focuses on the case of the hugely successful and popular animated parodic sitcom, The Simpsons, and its playful attack on advertising and promotional culture. Currently in its 16th season, The Simpsons broadcasts to approximately 60 million viewers in 70 countries weekly, offering a playful critique of television from within the television frame.

(2005). Review Essay: 'The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World,' by S. Elizabeth Bird and 'Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture,' by Jason Mittell. Popular Communication: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 145-147.