IAMCR Awards winners

IAMCR hosts a number of awards and grants. At the Montreal conference we awarded IAMCR Prize in Memory of Stuart Hall, the New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship, and the UCF/IAMCR Urban Communication Research Grant. This regular feature in the newsletter highlights past winners and their contributions. In this issue, Cornelia Brantner, winner of  the 2015 New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship, describes her research.

Cornelia Brantner, Climate Change Award Winner 2015

The scientific and journalistic consensus about its existence notwithstanding, anthropogenic climate change and global warming remain politically and socially polarizing topics, particularly in online environments. Moreover, researchers blame the lack of comprehensive climate legislation and mitigation policies on the fact that advocates have failed to engage the public. Fortunately, research on media coverage of climate change and on climate change communication, in both traditional and online channels, has grown significantly in recent years. Nonetheless, there are still research gaps, particularly regarding online discussions of climate change and the contribution of grassroots climate movements.

The proposed project seeks to address some of these research voids by providing an analysis of climate change discussions from the Twitter microblogging platform. It is conceived as comparative study using qualitative and quantitative (automated and manual) approaches with a mixed method design in order to explore the discourse on climate change and global warming in different languages, regions and countries. The study will focus on actor networks, topics and sources, expressed sentiments, and the quality of the debate(s). The project will also look specifically at the roles of Twitter regarding "spaces and places" of protest and, thus, as the selection committee noted in its decision, it offers “a rich and integrative analysis of debates on climate change in social media”.

Currently, together with Jürgen Pfeffer (School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University) I am analyzing the actor networks and the internationalization of the climate change debate. From the Twitter Decahose (a 10% sample of all tweets) we extracted about 1 Million tweets over the course of three years related to climate change in multiple languages. We create user networks based on mentions and re-tweets for 20 countries/regions of interest. We analyze each of these networks in terms of reciprocity, fragmentation, and language diversity as well as the interconnectivity of the regional networks. We also localize regional networks in the global Twitter discourse network.

I am looking forward to present the first findings of the project at the IAMCR 2016 in Leicester. With its two awards the IAMCR contributes to foster effective communication that alleviates climate change issues, and it was a tremendous honor for me to receive the first "New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship" award for my proposal.

Since October, 2015 I am Temporary Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the Institute of Media and Communication at the Dresden University of Technology. Previously I was University Assistant at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna and visiting research scholar at the School of Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. My research and teaching focuses on visual communication, journalism, political communication, science communication, public sphere(s), social networks, and social movements. My publications appear in journals such as New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, or Visual Communication and in edited books such as Visualisierung und Mediatisierung [Visualization and Mediatization] (Halem, 2015), Visual Framing (Halem, 2013), or Digitale Öffentlichkeit(en) [Digital Public Sphere(s)] (UVK, 2015).

Cornelia Brantner