Research

Since 2021 I have been working at the University of Alberta as part of the Centre for Analysis of Relational Data (CARD) and as a postdoc on the international GEP-Analysis project.

I worked on the social network analysis subproject team of the GEP-Analysis project, which looked at the gendered collaboration patterns of key creatives in the film industries of Canada, the UK and Germany. We also simulated several policy-related “what if” scenarios and tested their impact on changing the gendered power structures in the networks. A summary of this work can be found on the Kinomatics website and in the project’s final report.

The other main strand of my research explores relational perspectives and tools for analysing the narrative marginalisation of women in popular Hollywood cinema. A concise (1,000 word) intro to this work can be found here, as well as in the journal articles listed below. All the data can be found in the movienetdata package, and the tools are implemented in the charinet package for R.

Publications

Jones, Pete. 2024. “What relational event models can reveal: Commentary on Thomas Grund’s ‘Dynamics of Denunciation: The Limits of a Scandal'". EPJ Data Science 13 (5). DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00432-3.

Jones, Pete, Deb Verhoeven, Aresh Dadlani and Vejune Zemaityte. 2024. “She Must Be Seeing Things! Gender disparity in camera department networks.” Social Networks 76: 120-134. DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2023.09.004. (First published online in 2023.)

Jones, Pete and Joshua Gulam. 2023. “A critical quantitative analysis of race and representation in the Fast Saga Films.” In Full-Throttle Franchise: The Culture, Business and Politics of Fast & Furious. London: Bloomsbury.

Jones, Pete, Eithne Quinn and Johan Koskinen. 2020. “Measuring centrality in film narratives using dynamic character interaction networks.” Social Networks 63: 21-37. DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2020.03.003.

Jones, Pete. 2020. “Diana in the World of Men: a character network approach to analysing gendered vocal representation in Wonder Woman.” Feminist Media Studies 20 (1): 18-34. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1510846. (First published online in 2018.)

Research interests

  • Creative industries inequalities
  • Feminism and post-feminism
  • Digital humanities / computational social science
  • Social network analysis

CV

I was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Manchester’s Department of Social Statistics from 2020-2021, further developing my doctoral research through the project Exploring the marginalisation of women in popular cinema using quantitative network tools.

Prior to this, I worked on the EmpoderaData project which is exploring data fellowships as a platform for building data literacy skills in Latin America in the context of sustainable development.

I received my PhD from the University of Manchester. The thesis is titled “A social network analysis approach to examining gendered character positions in popular film narratives” and can be found here.

Prior to my PhD, I completed an MSc in Social Research Methods and Statistics and a BA in Social Sciences, both at the University of Manchester. For more information on my education and qualifications, visit my ResearchGate or LinkedIn profile.