Extended Deadline for Abstracts: 7th April 2024 Deadline for Full Papers: 31st July 2024 Expected date of publication: August 2025 *Big Data Audiences* *Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies <https://journals.sagepub.com/home/con>* Guest Editors: Jennifer Hessler (North Carolina State University, US) and Elliot Montpellier (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, CA) Media ecosystems increasingly use big data audience insights to shape their distribution models, content production and curation, and marketing strategies, even while these developments are happening at different paces and with varied cultural and political implications from country to country. Existing scholarship on audience datafication largely takes a media economics approach, focusing on how data is informed by and shapes the actions of media industry stakeholders. This often elides the cultural stakes of audience datafication. Crucially, this issue brings together analysis of institutional structures with insights from critical sociologies of data to grapple how the big datafication of audiences converges with issues of cultural identity and exchange. This issue contends with the way big audience data practices are changing entertainment media ecosystems. Proposals might engage with how the implications of audience datafication are playing out differently in state-run, public, and commercial television systems, or how the increasing reliance on big data audience insights impacts the distribution of capital among creatives. At the same time, the issue engages with how big data is changing the way audiences are imagined and attributed value. Media distributors often spin the addressability afforded by big data as an opportunity to personalize content more effectively for globally diverse viewers. However, proposals might engage with how big data can limit the audience experience, or how the vastly scaled and real-time-actioned ways of addressing audiences also reify the distortions via which racial, gendered, national, and other inequalities manifest. We are especially interested in proposals that focus on the global south, and those that ground data in specific uses or consider data across sites from political, industrial, ethnographic, STS, anticolonial, or other approaches. Possible topics could include, but are not limited to: • How relationships between industry stakeholders are reconfigured via new practices of audience datafication. • The way that policies or funding models shape how audience data is collected or used. • Theoretical treatments of data colonialism, surveillance, and platform capitalism in relation to big data audiences. • The computational methods that are being used to imagine audience communities, or the conceptual frameworks that can be used to understand how big data addresses audiences. • The impacts that big data audience analytics have on national, gendered, LGBTQ, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other communities. Please send a 500-word abstract and a 100-word bio for each author to the guest editors at *bigdataaudiences.cnmt@gmail.com <bigdataaudiences.cnmt@gmail.com> *by* March 31st 2024.* Authors of accepted abstracts will be contacted by the guest editors and will be invited to submit full paper contributions (8000-9000 words) by July 31st 2024, with a target publication date of August 2025. Link to CFP here: https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/con/Final_Big%20Data%20Aud... CFP%20Convergence%20(4)%20(1)-1709697529.pdf <https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/con/Final_Big%20Data%20Audiences%20CFP%20Convergence%20(4)%20(1)-1709697529.pdf>