Matthew Hanchard – författare

Reception studies have made film audiences increasingly visible, while surveys track trends and policymakers gather information about audience preferences and demographics. But little attention has been paid to the specific contextual relationships and interactions between films and individuals that generate and sustain audiences. This monograph develops the idea of audiences as interactive and relational, introducing three innovative concepts: ‘personal film journeys’, five types of audience formations and five geographies of film provision. A major challenge of audience research is how to capture the richness of people’s social and cultural engagement with film. To achieve this, the book uses an innovative mixed-methods research and computational ontology. It develops ground-breaking theory and concepts and an innovative methodology based on an extensive data-set derived from the under-researched area of British regional film audiences.

This book fills a gap in sociological theory surrounding how we engage with digital maps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap (OSM). Combining digital sociology and practice theory, the book works through empirical examples to cumulatively develop a new sociological theory on the social consequences of digital maps.