About the research group

The group engages with all aspects of emerging media, including their production and industrial contexts, their design and artistic expressions, and their ecologies of use including the social and cultural communities that arise around them. It explores how new technologies give rise to new media forms and modes of participation (for example, YouTube forming a basis for expressions of fandom such as video essays and gameplay videos); how dominant media are themselves adapting in response to digital technologies (for example, through streaming     ); and how emerging media technologies such as XR and AI are influencing and hybridising with more established forms such as films and video games.

The research group for emerging media is cross-disciplinary and combines perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and computer science, and welcomes researchers from all disciplines at Infomedia. Accordingly, it is open to diverse approaches to studying emerging media technologies, forms, and uses. These include traditional research methods, such as textual analysis, and qualitative/quantitative industry and audience research; as well as emergent digital methods such as netnographic research and data mining; and methods rooted in media practice such as software design, creative practice, and videographic research.

The focus areas of the research group span the following:

• Critical studies of the cultural, political, and societal implications of emerging audiovisual media
• Perspectives to understand the communities that utilise emerging media
• Investigation of the impact of digital technologies on the production, distribution, and infrastructures of emerging and established media
• Analyses of the form, content, and narratives of emerging media, and how these represent different processes, interactions, ideologies, and demographics
• Exploration and production of new content and narrative forms for digital media and  virtual environments
• Design of experimental prototypes to explore value propositions in emerging media, especially in student-active projects at the bachelor and master level

The group is also collaborating with UiB’s Center for Digital Narrative on investigating the impact and implications of digital technology on the emergence of digital narrative forms.