A pragmatic cognitive model for the interpretation of verbal–visual communication in television news programmes

The combination of the verbal and the visual track in television news discourse poses a considerable analytical challenge. In the viewers’ minds the co-habitation of these two semiotic channels triggers a complex network of inferential processes, based on expectations of coherence and relevance, with which they make sense of the representation of the world offered in the news. Through the analysis of a number of news items, this article considers the cognitive processes which viewers may activate when extracting meaning from the multimedial messages contained in television news. The analysis of news items from two British television networks offered by the authors traces the possible meanings that, it is assumed, become available to a potential, ‘idealised’ or ‘implied’ viewer, who accesses the information with some social and cultural knowledge of contemporary Britain. Building on existing studies, the article proposes a model for the classification of verbal–visual relations

De Plenderleith a Al Gore: o ideário vigente na conservação de bens culturais móveis no século XXI

O texto discute idéias predominantes, hoje, nas práticas de conservação de bens culturais móveis no Ocidente. São apontadas, também, algumas tendências de pensamento em diferentes contextos de trabalho, identificando-se eventuais mudanças e semelhanças entre as idéias anteriormente vigentes e aquelas que muito provavelmente sejam, já, um legado para este novo século.This article discusses the prevailing concepts referring to the conservation of cultural heritage collections. Some trends such as some lines of thought are also indicated, identifying occasional changes and similarities among the ideas previously in force and those that, probably, are already a legacy for this new century

The Clacton Spear: the last one hundred years

In 1911 an eminent amateur prehistorian pulled the broken end of a pointed wooden shaft from Palaeolithic-age sediments at a seaside town in Essex. This artefact, still the earliest worked wood to be discovered in the world, became known as the Clacton Spear. Over the past 100 years it has variously been interpreted as a projectile weapon, a stave, a digging stick, a snow probe, a lance, a game stake and a prod to ward off rival scavengers. These perspectives have followed academic fashions, as the popular views of early hominins have altered. Since discovery the Clacton spear has also been replicated twice, has undergone physical transformations due to preservation treatments, and has featured in two public exhibitions. Within this article the changing context of the spear, its parallels, and all previous conservation treatments and their impacts are assessed.© 2015 Royal Archaeological Institute. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Archaeological Journal on 3rd March 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi.org/10.1080/00665983.2015.1008839.The attached document is the author(’s’) final accepted/submitted version of the journal article. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it

News Values and Newsworthiness

How events become news has always been a fundamental question for both journalism practitioners and scholars. For journalism practitioners, news judgments are wrapped up in the moral obligation to hold the powerful to account and to provide the public with the means to participate in democratic governance. For journalism scholars, news selection and construction are wrapped up in investigations of news values and newsworthiness. Scholarship systematically analyzing the processes behind these judgments and selections emerged in the 1960s, and since then, news values research has made a significant contribution to the journalism literature. Assertions have been made regarding the status of news values, including whether they are culture bound or universal, core or standard. Some hold that news values exist in the minds of journalists or are even metaphorically speaking “part of the furniture,” while others see them as being inherent or infused in the events that happen or as discursively constructed through the verbal and visual resources deployed in news storytelling. Like in many other areas of journalism research, systematic analysis of the role that visuals play in the construction of newsworthiness has been neglected. However, recent additions to the scholarship on visual news values analysis have begun to address this shortfall. The convergence and digitization of news production, rolling deadlines, new media platforms, and increasingly active audiences have also impacted on how news values research is conducted and theorized, making this a vibrant and ever-evolving research paradigm

Rebirth or resistance? Reimagining Photojournalistic Routines in the Australian news media

The fact that the staff position of the photojournalist has been all but eradicated is widely acknowledged in the journalism literature (Anderson 2013; Allan 2015; Thomson 2016), and Australia is no exception. Photographic departments at Fairfax and News Corp have been decimated, again (Battersby 2017; Meade 2017). The ABC has for a long time been relying on reporters, editors, producers, and presenters to supply news imagery, especially on regional happenings. Some news organisations blame layoffs on the ubiquity of free imagery online (Lang 2011, referring to CNN’s decision to lay off 50 photojournalists, technicians and librarians), and a key question emerging from this trend is whether citizens and organisations outside of journalism, through their engagement with the digital economy, are re-shaping and re-defining photojournalistic practice.To address this question, I explore the sourcing of news imagery by the major news providers in Australia: Fairfax, News Corp, and the ABC, including the relative newcomer to the Australian market, Guardian Australia. I combine large-scale quantitative surveys of the sourcing of news images in the Australian news media with qualitative ethnographic interviews with industry professionals in order to yield multiple perspectives on the massive cultural shifts being experienced by the journalism industry today and to assess their ability to adapt positively to change. Three case studies, investigating the sourcing and use of news photography in the reporting of special events – the federal election of 2016, Australia Day 2017 – and of a spot news event – the major storms of September 2016 in South Australia – are complemented by a study of routine everyday reporting throughout 2017. By examining both special news events and the more mundane reporting of everyday events/happenings, this study provides the most comprehensive study of photojournalism in Australia today. My conclusions show that rather than relying on the freely available online imagery produced by citizen witnesses, the Australian news media continue to source images from professional photographic sources: among them former employees now working as freelancers. Thus, we see a reconfiguration of work routines in the Australian photojournalistic community, routines that are much diminished in terms of stability, security, and remuneration

Introducing Kaleidographic: A new visualization tool for multimodal discourse analysis

For researchers working with ‘modal ensembles’ (Kress 2010: 28), where meaning is made at the intersection of multiple semiotic modes, the ability to demonstrate the convergence and divergence of meaning between semiotic modes, both within and across multiple texts, has to date been a near impossible task. In this paper, I introduce Kaleidographic, a visualization tool that is capable of demonstrating patterns within and across texts (inter- and intra-textual relations) and within and across semiotic modes (inter- and intra-semiotic relations). I do this using a corpus of 6299 Instagram posts consisting of a photograph, caption text and various hashtags, collected over a 5-day period from 30 June to 4 July 2016 and relating to the Australian federal election. In analysing this data, it became clear that Instagrammers make use of multiple resources (verbal and visual) to express both political affiliation with a political party (e.g. photographing themselves wearing a Greens campaign t-shirt, or explicitly stating in the caption ‘I voted Green’) and to distance themselves from a particular party or politician (e.g. in the use of the hashtag #fuckyouturnbull), sometimes doing both within one post. While analysing and then collating individual instances of these affiliative strategies is straightforward, it is difficult to get a sense of the dataset as a whole, where these strategies occur (across texts), how they are realised (across semiotic modes) and the extent to which they converge and diverge. I use Kaleidographic to demonstrate all of these relations

News values in Australia Day reporting: a social semiotic approach

This paper focuses on the visual analysis of newsworthiness, i.e. the worth of an event to be reported as news, as established via a set of news values (such as Negativity, Proximity, Eliteness, Unexpectedness, etc). Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) examines how this ‘worth’ – and these news values – are established through semiotic resources and practices. The DNVA framework has been developed in collaboration with Monika Bednarek (also presenting at ASFLA), whose research focuses on linguistic analysis. In contrast, this paper will be dedicated to examining visual resources that construct news values. The framework for visual DNVA draws on Kress & van Leeuwen’s (2006) systems for meaning making in images, Caple’s (2013) Balance Network for visual compositional meaning, and work by White (2014) and Economou (2014) on the attitudinal work of news images. Application of the framework will be demonstrated by examining visual news reporting about Australia Day over two consecutive years (2016 and 2017). The paper will also briefly explore the application of visual DNVA to news reporting in other cultural contexts, specifically in relation to the reporting of the Chinese National Holiday in the Chinese news media. The paper works as a companion piece to Monika Bednarek’s paper, but both keynotes will be presented in such a way that they make sense for those only able to attend one of the two

Analytical Tools and Methods for Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA)

This workshop introduces a new framework for analyzing the construction of newsworthiness in contemporary digital news reporting. This framework is called DNVA, or discursive news values analysis (Bednarek & Caple 2017). I will begin by briefly explaining what DNVA is, how it has been applied so far, and importantly, why do it? Then, we will look more closely at the analytical tools for conducting both verbal and visual DNVA, exploring key methodological issues when sampling data from contemporary digital news contexts. The main part of the workshop will focus on a case study investigating the construal of visual DNVA in reporting about China National Day in the Chinese news media. Time will be given over to participants to analyze a series of images using the visual DNVA framework, and to discuss the findings from this analysis. There should be time at the end of the workshop to discuss potential adaptation of this framework for cross-cultural DNVA research. In preparation for the workshop, participants can read more about DNVA at the companion website: https://www.newsvaluesanalysis.com

Analyzing the multimodal expression of thoughts and feelings in social media posts

Instagram is an image-centric social media application, launched in October 2010, with the explicit aim of allowing members to share their smart phone photos over the Internet. Like with other social media applications, members use this platform to share their thoughts and feelings about any topic, and these thoughts and feelings may be expressed both visually and verbally. In this presentation, I analyze the visual and verbal resources that members employed as they posted content to Instagram around the time of the 2016 Australian federal election. I focus in particular on a small set of 92 Instagram posts that all used the hashtag #dogsatpollingstations. I explore different approaches to the analysis of these posts and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of examining words and images separately and then together as a ‘modal ensemble’ (Kress 2010: 162). To do this, I use a combination of different methods and analytical frameworks: I use corpus linguistic methods (examining word frequency and concordances)to uncover the topics of these posts, and van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor networks for verbal and visual representations to examine how the representations of social actors are constructed in these posts. Analysis of the visuals also makes use of multimodal discourse analysis (van Leeuwen 2008; Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; Caple 2013). As such, this combination of multiple methods is an example of CAMDA, corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (Bednarek & Caple 2014: 151; Bednarek & Caple 2017).The results demonstrate the multisemiotic ways in which social media users express their thoughts and feelings about certain topics (Caple 2018). This talk will be of interest to anyone researching image-centric social media and how words and images combine to make meaning