The Interplay of Images and Texts in Climate Change Debate

Introduction

Images and texts are both important components during a debate concerning climate change issues on an online arena such as social media, containing different messages. The same piece of text can be used by different groups of people with completely different meanings. Similarly, the same picture can be used and explained by different parties, giving entirely opposite interpretations. How can we describe such interplay within the context of public administration, especially with the help of computational tools, to make the analyses scalable and repeatable, is the main concern of this project.

Project description

The core of this MSc Thesis project (36 ECTS) is to understand the interplay of images and texts used by people in the online climate change debate on social media, transcending geographical boundaries. This project will start with exploring a large multimodal dataset of Tweets and possibly associated images about climate change in either English or Dutch languages. Computational methods such as topic modelling, social network analysis, sentiment analysis, geocoding, etc., might be used at different stages of the project to support the analytical process, depending on the objectives and interests of both the student and the supervisors.

The preferred candidate for the project would be described as:

• Having a basic knowledge with programming (experience of using Python and relative libraries)
• Knowing or willing to learn the concept of social networks or graphs
• Curious about computational and/or statistical methods in social science studies
• Interested in climate change related debates
• Willing to accept the challenge of a highly inter-disciplinary research project