Introducing quantitative reception aesthetics: Television reception and textual engagement

Abstract

This article introduces quantitative reception aesthetics as a method and demonstrates how big data derived from social media services and textual analysis can be employed to uncover hitherto hidden processes of media spectatorship. It demonstrates how mixing quantitative and qualitative methods allows us to understand textual engagement and how media spectatorship evolves over time. Taking the Norwegian web series, Skam (2015–2017), as its case study, the article demonstrates how (web)television engagement on Instagram is linked to aesthetics and narrative events and how textual engagement is more universal than perhaps post-structuralist reception studies of media reception might have us believe.