We are pleased to announce that, the Center for Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy will be inviting Professor Luigi Curini (Università degli Studi di Milano) to give a special seminar in 17, January 2025.
*Lunch with Prof Curini will be served after the seminar. If you wish to attend, please contact Professor Airo Hino ([email protected]) by Tuesday 14 January.
【Title】
Understanding Multimodal Political Communication: a Computational Analysis of Textual and Visual Elements in the EP 2024 Campaign by Luigi Curini & Giovanni Pagano (University of Milan)
【Event information】
• Date&Time: 17(Fri.) January, 10:40-12:20
• Venue: Room406, Bld.3, Waseda Campus
• Lecturer: Luigi Curini（Professor of Political Science, Università degli Studi di Milano）
• Language: English
• Open to members of Waseda University and the general public. Free admission.
• Registration：Not Required.
• Co-sponsor: WINPEC Empirical/Positive Political Science Workshop, Research Project on Survey and Media Data Research Group
• 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.
• Organizer: Airo Hino ([email protected])
