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Article published In: Terminology, Ideology and Discourse
Edited by Katia Peruzzo and Paola Catenaccio
[Terminology 30:1] 2024
► pp. 35–57

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Climate knowledge or climate debate?

Using word embeddings and Critical Discourse Analysis to compare expert and media representations of climate knowledge

 | Grenoble Alpes University
Published online: 18 July 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00076.bur
Abstract
While media coverage of climate change has been shown to imply selective knowledge transformation (Carvalho, Anabela. 2007. “Ideological Cultures and Media Discourses on Scientific Knowledge: Re-Reading News on Climate Change.” Public Understanding of Science 16 (2): 223–243. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Brand, Alexander, and Achim Brunnengräber. 2012. “Conflictive Knowledge Constructions on Climate Change through Mainstream and Alternative Media?” Transcience 3 (1): 7–24.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Kunelius, Risto, and Anna Roosvall. 2021. “Media and the Climate Crisis.” Nordic Journal of Media Studies 3 (1): 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), studies assessing the potential for climate experts’ terminology to acquire ideological undertones as it enters mediatic discourses are still scarce. Through this article, we aim to compare the meaning climate experts and the media give to terms pertaining to climate change in English discourses and to determine whether potential cotextual variation in the discourses produced by these two communities have ideological implications. To this aim, we use the deep learning algorithm Word2vec (Mikolov, Tomas, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean. 2013. “Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and Their Compositionality.” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 261. [URL]; González Granado, Nicolas. 2021. « A Glimpse into Terminology Research with R: Two Experiments Exploring Diastratic Variation in a Large Specialized Corpus ». Master thesis in Translation and technology (Terminology). Geneva: University of Geneva. [URL]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to identify terms whose cotext of occurrence is prone to high variability depending on whether it is included in a newspaper corpus on climate change or one composed of reports from intergovernmental organizations. We then rely on statistical tools from corpus linguistics to compare the main co-occurrences of two of the terms identified – adaptation and energy security –, which we combine with Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid Khosravinik, Michal Krzyzanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse and Society 191: 273–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to interpret the variation in terms of meaning and ideological significance. Results suggest that the appropriation of expert terminology by the media does entail a certain degree of conceptual variation, which notably seems to allow for bringing issues of social justice, financing and energy transition into focus and assessing expert knowledge along those lines.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The media, experts, and the diffusion of climate knowledge
  • 3.Theoretical and methodological framework: Word embeddings, corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis
    • 3.1A “methodological synergy”
    • 3.2Word embeddings using Word2vec
    • 3.3Critical Discourse Analysis
  • 4.Identifying terms that are most likely to see their meaning debated
    • 4.1Description of the corpus
    • 4.2Building the Word2vec models
    • 4.3Measuring cosine similarity
    • 4.4Results
  • 5.Terminology put to the test of ideology: How are concepts being negotiated as they enter media discourses?
    • 5.1Case study 1: Adaptation
      • 5.1.1Definition
      • 5.1.2Collocational and Critical Discourse Analysis
        • Adaptation as an answer to risk
        • Adaptation as an opportunity
        • Adaptation as a financing issue
      • 5.2Case study 2: Energy security
        • 5.2.1Definition
        • 5.2.2Collocational and Critical Discourse Analysis
          • Energy security as an objective
          • Climate change mitigation as a threat to energy security (and vice versa)
          • Energy security as a co-benefit (of climate mitigation)
  • 6.Discussion: Co-creating responses to climate change through science and debate
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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