Guest seminar: John Bateman
Welcome to this week’s IMS seminar!
This week's guest speaker is John Bateman, Professor of English Applied Linguistics at the University of Bremen
About the seminar
The search for audiovisual narrative patterns in news reporting: a multimodal approach
It is well established in journalism and media studies that news reporting can often be considered in narrative terms. Turning events into ‘stories’ can increase both engagement on the part of audiences and, arguably, understanding of events by making ‘causal’ relationships among those events and their protagonists explicit. It is equally well known, however, that constructing such relationships offers sites for ideological difference and contest: narrativisation is also always already interpretation and so is driven by value systems and motives of those doing the interpreting.
This process clearly demands detailed critical reflection but being able to perform that reflection is challenged by the sheer diversity of the forms of expression engaged by contemporary media, which range freely over spoken language, written language, still and moving images, sounds, graphs, diagrams, charts, and many more. Moreover, it is not only individual texts or single images that need to be considered: these forms of expression appear together as orchestrated multimodal messages whose dynamic composition plays a major role for uptake.
In short: entire combinations of diverse forms of expression operate synergistically to form complex multimodal messages unfolding in time whose consequences may not always be clear, even to their producers. Even reputable news channels might then engage narrative structures with disinforming side-effects. To gain more analytic hold on communication of this kind, it is therefore crucial to develop techniques both for recognising reoccurring multimodal narrative structures when they occur and for exploring their intended and actual take-up by audiences.
To this aim, I offer an overview of the approach pursued within our FakeNarratives project, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). The project draws on state-of-the-art computational audiovisual processing and visualisation techniques combined with empirically driven multimodal discourse theory in an initial attempt to identify potentially problematic narrative structures across a collection of news media spanning both public service and alternative news videos.
Relevant reading
Tseng, Chiao-I.; Liebl, Bernhard; Burghardt, Manuel; Bateman, John A.: FakeNarratives – First Forays in Understanding Narratives of Disinformation in Public and Alternative. News Videos. In: DHd2023. 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7715277
Bateman, John A. and Tseng, Chiao-I. "Multimodal discourse analysis as a method for revealing narrative strategies in news videos" Multimodal Communication, vol. 12, no. 3, 2023, pp. 261-285. https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2023-0029
Short biography
John Bateman, research professor at Bremen University, Germany, specializes in functional and computational linguistics and multimodal semiotics. His research interests include functional linguistic approaches to multilingual and multimodal document design, semiotic foundations, and theories of discourse as well as the development of robust methodologies for multimodal analysis.
Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen