Inside Trading Cultures

The Top Citizen Science (TCS) project Inside Trading Cultures expands the existing FWF research project Trading Cultures. An ethnography of international trade fairs for television programs, music and books with aspects of involving interested citizens in the research process. The main project analyzes the role of international trade fairs and markets for three different media industries (TV, music, books) in a comparative way. By applying ethnographic fieldwork, especially participant observation, annual trade fairs are explored thoroughly. The ethnographic approach is suitable to gain deep and true-to-life insights into the media industry traders mundane and taken for granted practices and routines. By the use of participation and observation in the field, these practices and routines are described in a thick way from the traders inside perspectives. Simultaneously, a critical scientific and analytical distance from the outside is maintained. Since researchers and their perceptions during participant observation are the main element of data collection and analysis, the critical reflection of the methodical procedure is an ever-present core activity of the research process. The project Inside Trading Cultures draws on this importance and both expands and challenges the perceptions and interpretations of ethnographers with those of citizen scientists interested in literature and the trading of books. The main goal of the TCS project is to achieve a multiplicity of perspectives on the practices and routines taking place at business-to-business book trade fairs through the involvement of people with different horizons of knowledge and experience in doing participant observation. Beyond that, participating citizens are provided an exclusive insight into a usually non-accessible area of the everyday culture of international book trade. At the heart of the Inside Trading Cultures project is the fieldwork at Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2017. The fieldwork team is composed of nine citizen scientists and three social scientists. The project is primarily addressed to multipliers in the world of literature and books. That is local booksellers, librarians and teachers from the Greater St. Pölten area. Above, it is also directed at those with a close relation to reading, literature and books, and at people interested in questions of how systems of trading and consuming media and cultural goods operate. That means, also passionate readers or committed pupils are invited to take part in the TCS project.

No additional funding sources recorded.