Communicating affect and emotions online

Digital communication fosters different forms of affective communication and emotional sharing. Examples include the affective news streams online produced by professional and citizen journalists, the ‘storms’ of affective reactions to unfolding natural disasters, political crises, attacks, and the different types of emotional sharing in the face of death and mourning.  In these cases, networked users (re)create and participate to public, semi-public or private performances of emotion. Their practices end up reconfiguring public life, but also the nature of emotion. More specifically, in digital environments emotion is networked, i.e. it connects different people and groups and prompts further sharing. It is also mediated, i.e. transmitted and communicated via different media, and it is mediatized, in that it is submitted to, or becoming dependent on, the media and their logic, and increasingly also to the logic and affordances of social media.  This workshop focuses on different aspects of affective communication and emotional sharing in digital environments. It looks at how affect flows and circulates, how emotion is used as a resource for self-presentation, stance-taking and community-building online and explores the broader social and research implications of such uses and practices.

Korina Giaxoglou, Open University, London, UK. (Thursday, 13th December, 14:15pm-15:15pm, room ANT 5060)

The shared story of #JeSuisAylan on Twitter: story participation and stancetaking in visual small stories

Despite an increased interest in the discourse representations of refugees, little attention has been paid so far to the circulation of such portrayals online. This article addresses this gap by examining networked users’ reactions to the iconic image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year old boy who drowned in the Mediterranean in 2015, which quickly turned into a shared story online. By analysing story frames (i.e. orientation to the Storyrealm, Taleworld, or Outside world) (De Fina, 2016) in multimodal posts dated 3rd September 2015 and featuring the hashtag #JeSuisAylan, we show how hashtags, comments and images combine into visual small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2016), which prompt acts of stancetaking as affective and narrative meta-comments to the shared story. Our analysis calls attention to the importance of looking at stancetaking as embedded in storytelling activities and calls for extending the critical study of discourse representations to the study of their uptake in story participation.

Catherine Bouko, University of Gent, Belgium. (Friday, 14th December, 10:00am-11:00am, room ANT 5081)

Citizens’ emotions on Twitter in the aftermath of the EU referendum

In this talk, we seek to determine how emotions on Twitter can be framed in emotional patterns and how these patterns might align or disalign people, notably through the subjective presence of the tweets’ authors. Our case study for this proposal are the citizens’ reactions to the Brexit vote. On 24 June 2016, the day the results of the British referendum on EU membership were announced, more than four million posts including the hashtag #Brexit were posted worldwide on Twitter within a matter of hours. Supplementing computer-driven studies, which focus on general patterns of content emerging in the wake of the ‘Brexit’ vote on Twitter, our quantitative-qualitative research seeks to provide finely-grained insights related to citizens’ reactions to Brexit after the EU-referendum on Twitter.

To gain an understanding of citizens’ emotional practices on Twitter, we analyzed ‘emotion talk’, which comprises the linguistic occurrences that denote emotion (Bednarek 2008:11) and focused on the following linguistic markers, inscribed in nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs: mental disposition terms; fixed figurative expressions ; psycho-physiological descriptions of emotional experiences.

We analyzed all the tweets comprising emotion(s) among a corpus of over 2,000 Brexit-related tweets collected from Twitter between June 24 and July 23 2016 in light of Bednarek’s three factors which allow to classify affect patterns (emoted vs. unemoted affect, directed vs. undirected and affect covert vs. overt affect). We constructed a typology of eleven affect patterns, in which the subjective presence of the tweets’ authors is graded in terms of a cline of intensity, from low to high subjective presence.

Our corpus is composed of tweets with multimodal content (images, GIF’s, etc.). Given that including visual content in tweets is a widely adopted practice, we sought to examine to what extent citizens use text-image relations to express their emotions when they react on Twitter in the aftermath of the EU referendum. Our research reveals that some affect patterns are specific to multimodal tweets.