Rethinking methodologies for understanding audiences and how viewers engage with TV content is at the heart of the article that opens the 2021 Spring issue of Critical Studies in Television. The latest shift in television’s ontology provides an opportunity for Gry Rustad and Anders Olof Larsson to reassess the methodological implications for studying the interrelationship between narrative events and audience engagement. Rustad and Larsson’s article on the Norwegian teen drama streaming television series, Skam (2015–2017), builds on a growing body of research on the web TV serial about the daily life of teenagers at the Hartvig Nissen School set in Oslo (see Krüger and Rustad, 2019; Sundet, 2020). Largely focused on understanding the institutional context, the Norwegian public service broadcaster with its web television service (NRK TV) and radio channel NRK P3’s website (Sundet, 2021), but also fan engagement through social media (Sundet, 2021, 2020; Rustad, 2018), the authors of this article use Skam as a case study to extend these concerns and ask broader methodological questions. In particular, they examine how contemporary audience research methods that track audience behaviour in greater detail can be combined with textual analysis to think anew about audience responses as textual constructions. Their methodology of quantitative reception aesthetics makes visible the role of affect in reception, triggered by what the authors call ‘emotional aesthetics’: a textual style that draws on conventions of soap opera and melodrama and uses ‘close-ups, gestures, reactions, intimacy, interiors and erupting emotions’. Identifying the coordinates of such a methodological intervention, Rustad and Larsson provide a rebuke to post-structural reception studies, by seeking instead to combine quantitative analysis of digital trace data with qualitative textual analysis as a way to provide a more effective anchor for making sense of the affective responses of the audience.

中文翻译：

---

社论

重新思考用于理解观众以及观众如何与电视内容互动的方法是本文的核心，该文章将在2021年春季出版《电视评论研究》。电视本体的最新变化为格里·鲁斯塔德（Gry Rustad）和安德斯·奥洛夫·拉尔森（Anders Olof Larsson）提供了一个机会，可以重新评估研究叙事事件与观众参与之间的相互关系的方法论含义。Rustad和Larsson在挪威青少年戏剧流媒体电视连续剧Skam上的文章（2015-2017年），是基于网络电视连续剧中有关奥斯陆Hartvig Nissen学校青少年日常生活的一系列研究的结果（见Krüger和Rustad，2019； Sundet，2020）。挪威公共服务广播公司主要关注其机构背景，其网络电视服务（NRK TV）和广播频道NRK P3的网站（Sundet，2021年），还通过社交媒体吸引粉丝（Sundet，2021年，2020年； Rustad， 2018年），本文作者将Skam用作案例研究来扩展这些问题并提出更广泛的方法论问题。特别是，他们研究了如何更详细地跟踪受众行为的当代受众研究方法可以与文本分析结合起来，重新考虑受众的反应，如文字结构。他们的定量接受美学方法论使情感在接受中的作用可见，由作者称之为“情感美学”触发：一种文字风格，借鉴了肥皂剧和情节剧的惯例，并使用“特写镜头，手势，反应，亲密关系，内饰和爆发情绪”。Rustad和Larsson指出了这种方法干预的坐标，通过寻求将数字跟踪数据的定量分析与定性文本分析相结合，以此为后结构接受研究提供了谴责，以此为更有效地理解观众的情感反应。