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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Redefining the Anthology: Forms and Affordances in Digital Culture
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Projects & Abstracts
2020-03-01
2021-09-06
2020-03-11
2024-03-11
Cinéma & Cie
Giulia Taurino
2020/03/01
University of Bologna/University of Montréal
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Redefining the Anthology: Forms and Affordances in Digital Culture
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16235/20254
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Redefining the Anthology: Forms and Affordances in Digital
Culture
Giulia Taurino / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
University of Bologna/University of Montréal




   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. A common conversation in the broader
field of media studies regards, for instance, the ways technologies operate as
drivers for cultural and social change. This perspective collides with a tendency to
observe digital transformations through the lenses of hard or soft determinism,2
a theoretical framework that advances a debate on the causes and effects of
technologies, and how they interact with previous socio-cultural, institutional
ecosystems. Among others, streaming platforms invite us to reconsider concepts
like platformization,3 digitalization,4 algorhythmics5 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, my research notably explores forms of content
organization inherited from pre-digital practices, as they transitioned to digital
culture through evolutionary processes and technological disruptions. Digital
culture is therefore intended here in its interaction with previous socio-cultural

1
  Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Professor Veronica Innocenti (University of Bologna) and
Professor Marta Boni (University of Montréal). For information: giulia.taurino2@unibo.it
2
  Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. by Merritt Roe
Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994).
3
  Anne Helmond, ‘The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready’, Social
Media + Society, 1.2 (2015), <https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080> [accessed 14 April
2020]; David B Nieborg and Thomas Poell, ‘The Platformization of Cultural Production:
Theorizing the Contingent Cultural Commodity’, New Media & Society 20.11 (2018), pp. 4275-92,
<https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818769694> [accessed 14 April 2020].
4
  David Tilson, Kalle Lyytinen and Carsten Sørensen, ‘Digital Infrastructures: The Missing IS
Research Agenda’, Information Systems Research, 21.4 (2010).
5
   Shintaro Miyazaki, ‘AlgoRHYTHMS Everywhere: A Heuristic Approach to Everyday
Technologies’, Off Beat (2013), pp. 135–48, <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401208871_010>
[accessed 14 April 2020].

                                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                                      Giulia Taurino


systems. Even more than other disruptions, digital cultures and economies had
indeed a pervasive impact on media, superposing themselves to pre-existing
social and industrial habits, while creating new ones. As Lev Manovich argues,
‘the computer media revolution affects all stages of communication, including
acquisition, manipulation, storage, and distribution; it also affects all types of
media — texts, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions’.6
   This dissertation accounts for such a digital turn7 and updates media studies
to reconsider how the Internet impacted human communication and activities
at all levels of making and spreading culture.8 In television, the term ‘digital’
addresses a rather complex intertwining of technological, economic, social
dynamics, with consequences on the production (making) and distribution
of (spreading) information, narratives and cultural forms at large. To further
explore evolutions in television, I examine the anthological turn,9 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. It is therefore important to consider
contextual media, economic and social environments, as well as historical
evolutions.
   Drawing upon a post-modern and post-structuralist perspective, this research
project ultimately accounts for 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. My research positions itself in this highly interconnected
technological, industrial, and cultural context where television content is
increasingly fragmented. In this scenario, the anthology form sets itself as a model
for grouping otherwise distinct, unrelated snippets of content into a coherent
collection. Due to its cross-historical, cross-media relevance, the anthology is
my case study to address the distribution of cultural content from pre- to post-
digital culture. I am notably interested in observing the connection, in constant
redefinition, between form, function and content in television anthology series,
where modularity is accentuated by a formal division into discrete narrative
modules, subjected to mechanisms of scalability, which make the anthology a
highly resilient form.


6
  Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 19.
7
  Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015).
8
  Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons,
2011).
9
  Milad Doueihi, Digital Cultures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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                Redefining the Anthology: Forms and Affordances in Digital Culture


   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, the
aim of this project is to investigate 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, my dissertation
offers a broader reading of the very interaction between anthological editorial
practices and algorithmic-driven recommendation systems. By focusing on the
evolution (temporal, historical dimension) and on the digital circulation (spatial,
geographic dimension) of the anthology form, this thesis inserts itself into a
larger conversation on digital-cultural studies. The final purpose is to give an
overview of the relation between anthological forms, distribution platforms and
consumption models, by outlining 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,10 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.




10
     Susan Carey, The Origin of Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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