Introduction : gender and geopolitics in the Eurovision Song Contest

From the vantage point of the early 1990s, when the end of the Cold War not only inspired the discourses of many Eurovision performances but created opportunities for the map of Eurovision participation itself to significantly expand in a short space of time, neither the scale of the contemporary Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) nor the extent to which a field of “Eurovision research” has developed in cultural studies and its related disciplines would have been recognisable. In 1993, when former Warsaw Pact states began to participate in Eurovision for the first time and Yugoslav successor states started to compete in their own right, the contest remained a one-night-per-year theatrical presentation staged in venues that accommodated, at most, a couple of thousand spectators and with points awarded by expert juries from each participating country. Between 1998 and 2004, Eurovision’s organisers, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and the national broadcasters responsible for hosting each edition of the contest expanded it into an ever grander spectacle: hosted in arenas before live audiences of 10,000 or more, with (from 2004) a semi-final system enabling every eligible country and broadcaster to participate each year, and with (between 1998 and 2008) points awarded almost entirely on the basis of telephone voting by audiences in each participating state. In research on Eurovision as it stands today, it would almost go without saying that Eurovision and the performances it contains have reflected, communicated and been drawn into narratives of national and European identity which were and are – by their very nature as a nexus between imaginaries of culture and territory – geopolitical

The ‘Gay Olympics’? : the Eurovision Song Contest and the politics of LGBT/European belonging

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over ‘LGBT rights’ and ‘Europeanness’ equally constitute the understandings of ‘the international’ with which Queer IR is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber’s reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with ‘queer intellectual curiosity’, this paper demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–14, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe/Russia relations, and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions – ranging from detachment to celebration – about ‘LGBT’ politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to LGBT rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around ‘LGBT equality’

Evidence for the influence of the mere-exposure effect on voting in the Eurovision Song Contest

The mere exposure, or familiarity, effect is the tendency for people to feel more positive about stimuli to which they have previously been exposed. The Eurovision Song Contest is a two-stage event, in which some contestants in the final will be more familiar to viewers than others. Thus, viewers’ voting is likely to be influenced by this effect. Previous work attempting to demonstrate this effect in this context has been unable to control for contestant quality. The current study, which used a novel procedure to analyse the way in which contestant countries distributed their points (a function of how viewers voted in those countries) between 2008 and 2011, showed that contestants did better if they previously appeared in a semifinal that was seen by voters. This is evidence that the mere exposure effect, alongside previously studied factors such as cultural and geographical closeness, influences the way viewers vote in the Eurovision

Examining collusion and voting biases between countries during the Eurovision song contest since 1957

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual event which attracts millions of viewers. It is an interesting activity to examine since the participants of the competition represent a particular country's musical performance that will be awarded a set of scores from other participating countries based upon a quality assessment of a performance. There is a question of whether the countries will vote exclusively according to the artistic merit of the song, or if the vote will be a public signal of national support for another country. Since the competition aims to bring people together, any consistent biases in the awarding of scores would defeat the purpose of the celebration of expression and this has attracted researchers to investigate the supporting evidence for biases. This paper builds upon an approach which produces a set of random samples from an unbiased distribution of score allocation, and extends the methodology to use the full set of years of the competition's life span which has seen fundamental changes to the voting schemes adopted. By building up networks from statistically significant edge sets of vote allocations during a set of years, the results display a plausible network for the origins of the culture anchors for the preferences of the awarded votes. With 60 years of data, the results support the hypothesis of regional collusion and biases arising from proximity, culture and other irrelevant factors in regards to the music which that alone is intended to affect the judgment of the contest.Comment: to be published in JASS

User experiments with the Eurovision cross-language image retrieval system

In this paper we present Eurovision, a text-based system for cross-language (CL) image retrieval. The system is evaluated by multilingual users for two search tasks with the system configured in English and five other languages. To our knowledge this is the first published set of user experiments for CL image retrieval. We show that: (1) it is possible to create a usable multilingual search engine using little knowledge of any language other than English, (2) categorizing images assists the user's search, and (3) there are differences in the way users search between the proposed search tasks. Based on the two search tasks and user feedback, we describe important aspects of any CL image retrieval system

Searching and organizing images across languages

With the continual growth of users on the Web from a wide range of countries, supporting such users in their search of cultural heritage collections will grow in importance. In the next few years, the growth areas of Internet users will come from the Indian sub-continent and China. Consequently, if holders of cultural heritage collections wish their content to be viewable by the full range of users coming to the Internet, the range of languages that they need to support will have to grow. This paper will present recent work conducted at the University of Sheffield (and now being implemented in BRICKS) on how to use automatic translation to provide search and organisation facilities for a historical image search engine. The system allows users to search for images in seven different languages, providing means for the user to examine translated image captions and browse retrieved images organised by categories written in their native language

Cultural Proximity and Trade

Cultural proximity is an important determinant of bilateral trade volumes. However, empirical quantification and testing are difficult due to the elusiveness of the concept and lack of observability. This paper draws on bilateral score data from the Eurovision Song Contest, a very popular pan-European television show, to construct a measure of cultural proximity which varies over time and within country pairs, and that correlates strongly with conventional indicators. Within the framework of a theory-grounded gravity model, we show that our measure positively affects trade volumes even if controlling for standard measures of cultural proximity and bilateral fixed effects.International trade Gravity equation Cultural proximity Eurovision song contest

The Eurovision St Andrews collection of photographs

This report describes the Eurovision image collection compiled for the ImageCLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) evaluation exercise. The image collection consists of around 30,000 photographs from the collection provided by the University of St Andrews Library. The construction and composition of this unique image collection are described, together with the necessary information to obtain and use the image collection

Azerbaijan in Transition

Jens Hölsche