Dr. Indrek Ibrus is a Professor of Media Innovation at Tallinn University’s (TLU) Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM), Estonia. He also curates BFM’s doctoral program. His research interests include media innovation, the evolution of the ubiquitous spatial internet, the emergence of contemporary metadata formats for audiovisual culture and industries, the broader evolution of modern creative industries, and the implications of cultural heritage digitization. He is currently principal investigator in the Estonian government-funded research project “Public Value of Open Cultural Data” and a work-package leader of CresCine, a Horizon Europe funded multi-year project improving the conditions for Europe’s small film countries. He has been a co-editor (together with Carlos A. Scolari) of Crossmedia Innovations (Peter Lang, 2012), editor of Emergence of Cross-Innovation Systems (Emerald, 2019) and co-author (with John Hartley and Maarja Ojamaa) of On the Digital Semiosphere (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is currently editing also research journal Baltic Screen Media Review.
The Public Value of Media Data: Conceptualizations and Ways of Measuring
In this presentation, Dr. Ibrus will be reporting on the work of their ongoing multi-year research project (https://publicvalueofdata.tlu.ee/) that studies the complex ways in which open data solutions in media and cultural sectors could generate ‘public value’. In conceptual terms, it builds on existing research traditions on (public) value creation, links these to work on innovation systems in media industries and investigates how new open data technologies such as the linked data and blockchains could be seen as conditioning the emergence of new kinds of “media innovation systems”. They have been studying existing data management systems to interpret how public service media institutions generate public value. But they are also developing new systems for them enabling them to do it even better. They are also collaborating with various startups experimenting with public blockchains in order to decentralize online media economies and generate public value again in different ways. That is, this project has been conceptual, empirical, and interventionist. It is also highly interdisciplinary as it combines network science and data science with media and innovation economics, media and communications studies, and cultural semiotics. The presentation will discuss their research results as well as their emergent conceptualizations of ‘public value’ in the era of media datafication.
Email ddi_comms@sfu.ca for details and Zoom link.
