Understanding Data Collection

This section can begin by identifying the preliminary definition: what is meant by reception studies? One useful academic definition can be found:

The practice of reception studies seeks out the evidence of actual audience responses and locates these within the context of the audience’s time, place and identity. The contributions to the section on “Reception” demonstrate that there is much more to this complex process than simply quoting a few reviews: sources include publicity materials, audience surveys and online fan communities. (Chapman, Glancy and Harper 2007:7)

The reception studies of films will first determine how the film text is interpreted and analysed within a particular social/cultural/political context. Thus, reception studies explore how “an interpretation or various interpretations of a single film have arisen”, as “reception

76 studies do not offer their own interpretation of a film, and they do not comment on the value of any one interpretation” (Chapman, Glancy and Harper 2007:182). Therefore, it can be considered that film reception studies will help the research to reject the idea of a single meaning for the purpose of film textual analysis, and investigate how the meanings and interpretations have been provided that are inherent in a specific context, which will make up for the previously-mentioned limitations of textual analysis. However, it will be problematic if this research accepts fully the principles of reception studies in the methodological aspect, as this study is not really about audience reception. But within a framework of social discourse analysis, the perspectives of audiences and directors give some interesting and useful insights about film analysis, as well as filmmaking, distribution and marketing. In this sense, the research will consider collecting data from “traditional media”, “new media”, and film festivals for the extension of film discourse analysis, which is the movement of discourse from film space to social space, echoing with the interdisciplinary argument that the research explores the interactions between film space and social space through New Tibetan Cinema. That is to say, the consideration of extra-filmic/sociological data collection coheres with discourse analysis in engaging in film analysis.

The planned use of empirical research methods is inspired by the function of the mass media, in which the medium is an extension of the human senses. In other words, the research network/circle of New Tibetan Cinema data collection has been built using public media. Echoing with the discussion on reception studies, in this project, a qualitative reading of film production notes has been applied in the data chapters for further analysis of Tibetan cinema. The research intends to recreate the discursive practices of Tibetan films through examining a wide range of publicity materials, film reviews and other relevant documents from fan communities. The process of the thesis’s data collection has been designed using three strategies for gathering sources, although in practice they have overlapped.

1. News/reports/interviews written in the orthodox mainstream media.56 2. “We Media”: personal film blogs/websites, WeChat57 and Weibo.58 3. Observational fieldwork: attending film festivals and field-conversations.

56

Orthodox mainstream media includes TV programmes, newspapers, magazines, etc. Some of these sources can also be found online.

57

See footnote 16, Introduction.

58

Weibo (微博 in simplified Chinese, weibo in Chinese Pinyin; literally, a Chinese microblogging website), allows users to exchange and publish small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links. The media sometimes directly uses “Weibo” to refer to Sina Weibo. However, there are other microblogging/weibo services in China, including Tencent Weibo, Sohu Weibo, and NetEase Weibo.

77 On the one hand, some preliminary findings can be identified through the news/reports/interviews picked up from the orthodox mainstream media and transcribed for Tibetan film/sociological analysis, which is a relatively traditional way of collecting reception sources and has been practised over several decades for film or media studies. On the other hand, research relationships and connections with Tibetan directors and organisers of film festivals were established through “We Media”; for example, the most popular communication software among Chinese people, WeChat and Weibo, which are both free. “[T]hese simple easy-to-use tools have enabled new kinds of collaboration unrestricted by time or geography. The result is an advance of new social patterns and means for self- expression” (Bowman and Willis 2003:8). The notion of “We Media” first arose in Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis’s research report, “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information”, published by the Media Center at the American Press Institute in July 2003. In this report, they provide an explicit definition of “We Media”, stating that:

We commissioned We Media as a way to begin to understand how ordinary citizens, empowered by digital technologies that connect knowledge throughout the globe, are contributing to and participating in their own truths, their own kind of news. (Dale Peskin, in Bowman and Willis 2003:v)

In other words, We Media is an internet platform through which citizens/people can publish/share their own news, such as eyewitness accounts, photo galleries and personal storytelling. As the report further elaborates in Chapter One, “Introduction to Participatory Journalism”:

The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history where, for the first time, its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitions but, potentially, by the audience it serves. Armed with easy-to-use Web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information. And it’s doing just that on the Internet:…The response on the Internet gave rise to a new proliferation of “do-it-yourself journalism.” (Bowman and Willis 2003:7)

To put it differently, We Media offers a broader area for this research to collect information/data from directors/audiences’ personal journalism, which includes film reviews, articles and interviews concerned with directors and their films, notifications of events for films screening/film festivals, and the progress/plans of new filmmaking and distribution. It can be seen that WeChat and Weibo are the largest Chinese We Media outlets for audience

78 users in the PRC, and that the aimed research participants use them to publish the daily news about Tibetan cinema and relevant Tibetan filmmaking events/film festival exhibitions.

Moreover, WeChat can be considered to be the most popular personal communication software among PRC citizens. Therefore, it “can also provide…a deeper level of understanding about the reporting by illustrating” (Bowman and Willis 2003:53), through individual field-conversations with research participants in a virtual private space to ensure easy-to-use-to-record, and also a “group-chat” for further social communication. Therefore, it can be argued that communication through We Media can lead to a lasting trust and effective practice of empirical methods in my research studies, avoiding restrictions of time and geography.