[Air-l] Funded PhD studentship at University of Surrey, UK

[Nina Wakeford]

* Please distribute widely to anyone who might be interested *

Consuming online digital media

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship based on a project to 
examine the factors now affecting and likely in the future to 
influence European consumers of online digital content, such as music 
and news.  The studentship is available from 1 September 2002 for two 
and a half years, with the possibility of further funding.

The studentship will be attached to a European project, SimWeb 
(http://www.simdigital.com) funded by the IST programme of Framework 
5, which is modelling the digital content market in Europe using 
multi-agent simulation.  The project team includes six partners, in 
Germany, France, Portugal, Spain and the UK, two of which are 
companies that sell online content.

The studentship will focus on providing a better understanding of why 
people might be interested in obtaining digital content (either free, 
or by subscription), the role of such content in their lives, and the 
relationship of online content to content from other, more 
traditional sources.  The research is likely to be  based on a 
combination of quantitative analyses of secondary data and 
qualitative analyses of interviews and observational data.

While the research would be expected to contribute to SimWeb, it 
would be a free-standing project.  There would be some travel to 
project meetings and to meet partners in Europe.  The studentship 
includes fees and a bursary of GBP 8500 per year.

The student will be based in a lively Department of Sociology, rated 
5* in the 2001 RAE, that is carrying out a number of projects on new 
media and communications (see, for example, 
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/incite/ and 
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/dwrc).  The University of Surrey 
(http://www.surrey.ac.uk/postgraduate/) is located in the historic 
market town of Guildford which is surrounded by beautiful 
countryside, is ideally situated within the North Downs, just 9 miles 
from the M25, 35 minutes by train from London Waterloo, and with 
quick access to both Heathrow and Gatwick airports by road, rail or 
bus.

Informal enquiries may be made by email to Nigel Gilbert at 
<n.gilbert at soc.surrey.ac.uk> (see 
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/staff/nigel_gilbert.html), who will be 
one of the student's supervisors.

Applications should include a CV, a covering letter and the names of 
two academic referees and should be sent by email to 
<A.McGill at soc.surrey.ac.uk>.

Closing date for applications: August 15.
__________________________________________________________________________
Professor Nigel Gilbert, FREng, AcSS, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Professor of
Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK. +44 (0)1483 689173

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