Speaker Series Featuring Chris Hart | Using the NewsScape Corpus to Explore Multimodal Meaning-Making in TV News Communication About Immigration
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
- Virtual event
- Zoom meeting link
Please join the School of Linguistics and Language Studies for a Speaker Series event featuring Dr. Chris Hart (Lancaster University).
Using the NewsScape Corpus to Explore Multimodal Meaning-Making in TV News Communication About Immigration
Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has shown how refugees and migrants are constructed in online and print-news media, verbally, visually and multimodally (Gabrielatos & Baker 2008; Martínez Lirola 2017; Romano & Dolores Porto 2021). Owing to the difficulties associated with obtaining and analysing large quantities of televisual data, however, the discursive construction of refugees and migrants in TV news has not been subject to similar interrogation.
This talk draws on research that exploits the NewsScape Corpus – a massive multimodal corpus of broadcast news collated by the International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab – to investigate the multimodal representation of refugees and migrants in television news. Accessed via CQPWeb (Hardie 2012), the corpus is searched for target utterances representing four different constructions: refugees/*migrants have VERBed and refugees/*migrants are VERBing. With a focus on expressions of motion and following filtering of the data to exclude noise, the co-verbal images accompanying 474 utterances are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively.
Results show that refugees/migrants are depicted in large rather than small groups, that they are depicted in transit somewhere along the migratory journey rather than in countries of origin or destination countries, that they are depicted on land more than at sea, that they are depicted in security contexts, and that they are erased represented instead through abstract forms such as maps and silhouettes. Certain of these language-image combinations emerge as obtaining genre-specific multimodal constructional status (Steen & Turner 2013) whose visual component is thus likely to be evoked even when not co-instantiated in discourse.
The ideological implications of these patterns of representation are discussed from the perspective of multimodal CDA (Machin 2013) where, for example, large-group depictions are shown to have dehumanising effects (Azavedo et al. 2021). The talk presents an empirical case study but also serves to demonstrate the utility of the NewsScape Corpus as a resource for multimodal corpus-assisted CDA.
Dr. Chris Hart (Linguistics Professor, Lancaster University) draws on insights and methods from cognitive science and critical discourse analysis to investigate the links between language, cognition and social/political action.