We are pleased to announce that, the Center for Positive\/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy will be inviting Professor Luigi Curini (Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Milano) to give a special seminar in 17, January 2025.<\/p>\n
*Lunch with Prof Curini will be served after the seminar. If you wish to attend, please contact Professor Airo Hino (airo@waseda.jp) by Tuesday 14 January.<\/p>\n
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\u2022 Date&Time: 17(Fri.) January, 10:40-12:20<\/p>\n
\u2022 Venue: Room406, Bld.3, Waseda Campus<\/p>\n
\u2022 Lecturer: Luigi Curini<\/a>\uff08Professor of Political Science, Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Milano<\/a>\uff09<\/p>\n \u2022 Language: English<\/p>\n \u2022 Open to members of Waseda University and the general public. Free admission.<\/p>\n \u2022 Registration\uff1aNot Required.<\/p>\n \u2022 Co-sponsor: WINPEC Empirical\/Positive Political Science Workshop, Research Project on Survey and Media Data Research Group<\/p>\n \u2022 Abstract: Contemporary political communication is increasingly characterized by the integration of textual, visual, and many other modalities. In this study, we present a methodology for computational social sciences to understand multimodal political communication, specifically communication employing both textual and visual elements. We propose an approach to simultaneously represent, contrast and analyze these components, thus improving the measurement of political phenomena, and offering deeper insight into political communication strategies. We use multimodal embeddings as a unified distributed representation capable of capturing the intertwined relationship between linguistic and visual elements in political messages. To achieve this, we leverage computational text analytic techniques to capture the semantics embedded within post captions. Simultaneously, we employ computer vision models to capture visual elements from accompanying images, embedding the visual narrative that supplements political discourse. We suggest that such a multimodal representation can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the communication strategies employed by political actors than unimodal models. We illustrate the utility of this approach by analyzing the communication adopted by political party leaders on Instagram in the context of the EP 2024 campaign.<\/p>\n