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Article published In: Networked Practices of Emotion and Stancetaking in Reactions to Mediatized Events and Crises
Edited by Korina Giaxoglou and Marjut Johansson
[Pragmatics 30:2] 2020
► pp. 222–246

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Emotions through texts and images

A multimodal analysis of reactions to the Brexit vote on Flickr

ORCiD logo with link | Ghent University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 6 March 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18060.bou
Abstract
We analyzed in multimodal Flickr posts how citizens express emotion in response to the outcome of the EU Referendum that led to the Brexit vote. We conceived a model that articulates three levels of analysis, in a bid to understand how meaning operates, namely how inscribed, signalled and/or supported emotion is expressed in narrative and/or conceptual representations, in image and in text, through logico-semantic relations of expansion, projection and/or decoration. We tested this model empirically on a corpus of 173 posts. Our results reveal that emotion is very often supported through images and that narrative representations are particularly prevalent in the text.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Emotion in affect, judgment and appreciation terms
    • 2.2Inscribed, signalled and supported emotion
    • 2.3Visual symbols and tropes
    • 2.4Four key challenges in text-image analysis
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Back and forth between image and text and between models
  • 4.Results
    • Layers of emotion in image and text
    • Set of patterns 1: Visual representations that do not contain any marker of emotion
    • Set of patterns 2: Visual representations that inscribe emotion
    • Set of patterns 3: Visual representations that support emotion
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
References (47)
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