Abigail De Kosnik
Gail is currently focused on the following projects:
#identity
Gail is currently working on a book dealing with Twitter and difference called #identity, collaboratively authored by her Color of New Media working group (http://colorofnewmedia.com/)
The Color of New Media Working Group seeks to add new voices, and new lenses, to the new media studies “conversation,” in order to diversify and broaden the scope of that conversation. The overarching goals of this group are to: share resources on issues of race/ethnicity/nation and new media, to foster the creation of new scholarship on these issues, and to nurture fellowship and social networking among scholars, particularly scholars of color, working in the field of new media studies.
Commitment Viewing
Gail is also engaged in a research project funded by Warner Brothers and organized by the Connected Viewing Initiative at UC Santa Barbara called "Commitment Viewing," on intensive online video consumption (http://www.carseywolf.ucsb.edu/mip/article/2015-connected-viewing-initiative-team#YouTube)
In this study, Prof. De Kosnik and a team of graduate student researchers will interview and observe Internet users ages 18 and older to understand how they develop “commitment viewing” practices around specific web series, personalities/vloggers/stars, and channels/brands. Defining “commitment viewing” as consumption of a media source that involves repetition, brand loyalty, emotional investment, and anticipation (in television, commitment viewing takes place when audiences think of certain shows as “must-see TV” and “appointment television.”), they will ask participants to discuss how they develop commitment viewing habits and routines in relation to online videos, such as subscribing to YouTube channels, binge-watching short- and long-form content, following a meme through successive videos, setting up alerts or notifications for uploaders, and eagerly awaiting, or searching for, the “next video” from a content provider.
About Gail
Dr. Abigail DeKosnik is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley with a joint appointment in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and in the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (TDPS). Her book on digital archives, Rogue Memory, is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2015. She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in Cinema Journal, The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures and elsewhere. She is the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). She and Sam Ford also wrote the annotated bibliography on “Soap Operas” for Oxford Bilbliographies Online (OBO).