World Futures: Multimodal Viewpoint Construction by Russian International Media

世界未来：俄罗斯国际媒体的多模态视角构建

• 批准号: AH/W010720/1
• 负责人: Anna Wilson
• 金额: $ 36.11万
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW010720%2F1
• 关键词: World; Futures; Multimodal; Viewpoint; Construction

Discussions of futures have never been more important and challenging than now when the world finds itself fighting COVID-19. People engage in conversations about what our lives will look like after the pandemic, and so do the media.The media often talk about futures to frame the way we think, and the media funded by the Russian State use viewpoint construction rooted in the depiction of futures as a subtle but powerful approach to manipulate and influence public opinion.Viewpoint construction techniques are not just verbal but multimodal: they combine words, prosodic cues such as intonation and timing, gesture, and movement, and other non-verbal elements. They rely heavily on culture, history, and other contextual knowledge, and if used for manipulative purposes, lead the viewer to draw a false conclusion, make an assessment, or come to an opinion that is beneficial to the hostile actor, without being aware that this is happening.In the true spirit of the digital humanities, our 2-year project will fuse cognitive and corpus-driven/based analyses of language, prosody, and gesture with area studies (regional knowledge: culture, literature, history, and society), while leveraging latest developments in machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) to tackle the problem at scale.We will combine our multimodal analysis of Russian international media broadcasts (English and Russian) with the analysis of audiences' comments on social media to open a window onto viewpoint construction in the audiences' minds and thus provide additional validity to our linguistic analysis. Our project will break new ground in cognitive and corpus linguistics to significantly increase the overall reliability of large media data analysis currently used in linguistics as well as other humanities and the social sciences. Our approach will help answer questions posed by academic researchers and Western policymakers in relation to future information threats and mitigations, as applied to Russia as a region of strategic importance. Ultimately, the project will go beyond the applied linguistics approach to disinformation analysis. It will enable researchers to test multimodal patterns found in a systematic way, thereby addressing one of the biggest challenges linguists face. Furthermore, the project will contribute to answering such big questions in multimodal research in theoretical linguistics (semantics, syntax, pragmatics, comparative) as:1) How are meanings constructed multimodally and how are multimodal meanings perceived?2) How is the construction of meanings distributed across gestural, prosodic, and verbal modes? Are the "redundant" modes of gesture and prosody really redundant?3) How do languages with quite distinct grammatical and phonetic properties, rooted in quite diverse historical and cultural backgrounds, realise the ideas of time and space multimodally while pursuing the same overarching communicative and pragmatic goals?

当世界发现自己正在与COVID-19作斗争时，对未来的讨论从未像现在这样重要和具有挑战性。人们谈论疫情过后我们的生活会是什么样子，媒体也是如此。媒体经常谈论未来，以框定我们的思维方式，而俄罗斯政府资助的媒体则利用植根于对未来的描绘的观点构建，作为一种微妙但有力的手段来操纵和影响公众舆论。观点构建技术不仅是口头的，而且是多模态的：它们将词语、韵律线索（例如语调和时机、手势和动作）以及其他非语言元素联合收割机组合在一起。他们严重依赖于文化，历史和其他背景知识，如果用于操纵目的，引导观众得出错误的结论，做出评估，或得出有利于敌对行为者的意见，而不知道这正在发生。在数字人文的真正精神中，我们为期2年的项目将融合认知和语料库驱动/基于语言，韵律，手势和区域研究（区域知识：文化，文学，历史和社会），同时利用机器学习的最新发展，自然语言处理（NLP）和计算机视觉（CV）来解决大规模的问题。我们将联合收割机结合我们对俄罗斯国际媒体广播的多模态分析（英语和俄语），分析受众在社交媒体上的评论，打开一扇窗户，了解受众心中的观点构建，从而为我们的语言分析提供额外的有效性。我们的项目将在认知和语料库语言学方面开辟新天地，以显着提高目前用于语言学以及其他人文和社会科学的大型媒体数据分析的整体可靠性。我们的方法将有助于回答学术研究人员和西方政策制定者提出的关于未来信息威胁和缓解的问题，适用于俄罗斯作为一个具有战略重要性的地区。最终，该项目将超越应用语言学方法来分析虚假信息。它将使研究人员能够以系统的方式测试多模态模式，从而解决语言学家面临的最大挑战之一。此外，该项目将有助于回答理论语言学（语义学，句法学，语用学，比较）多模态研究中的一些大问题：1）多模态意义是如何构建的，多模态意义是如何感知的？2)在手势、韵律和言语模式中，意义的构建是如何分布的？手势和韵律的“多余”模式真的是多余的吗？3)具有不同语法和语音特征的语言，植根于不同的历史和文化背景，如何在追求相同的总体交际和语用目标的同时，实现多模态的时间和空间概念？