Talk by Tatiana Styliari

Tatiana Styliari of the MRL will give a short talk on the progress and direction of her PhD.

Research on audience interactions with domestic or portable technologies and the construction of digital identity through social media are growing fields within screen studies, but the position of cinema-going within digital culture remains an under-explored aspect of that research. Digital identity emerges from a chain of online interactions, which leave a digital trace behind and consists of data, which describe us as an individual but also through our relationships with our online environment; this refers to a number of daily online interactions including commercial, interpersonal, professional and educational activities. Cinema-going equally can be conceived as a path with a start and an ending which leaves traces of digital identity behind such as watching a movie trailer online or writing an online film review, creating a potential to explore the role of digital data to answer questions around the value of cinema-going and its role in the construction of a cultural digital identity.

Tatiana’s PhD title is "Digital Identity at the movies: Personalising the cinema-going experience" and it’s multidisciplinary among the faculties of Film & Culture, Computer Science and Human Factors. It consists of two parts: The film studies one which is exploring the social dynamics of cinema-going in the digital age, how cinema-going audiences understand the construction of their digital identity, and the role that identity plays in their cinema-based activities; and a more “practical part” related to HCI and UX design aiming to create some prototypes for different groups of filmgoers in order to enhance their experience and engagement.