Anton Törnberg: Visual rhetoric of climate denialism: a multimodal mixed-method approach to image analysis
As the global climate crisis intensifies, so too does the counter-narrative propagated by the climate change counter-movement. In Sweden, this countermovement has not only been vociferous but has also employed sophisticated means of communication to bolster its agenda.
This paper embarks on an empirical investigation into the visual rhetoric employed by central actors within the countermovement in Sweden, delving into the visual dimensions of their political mobilization. While arguments and discourses of these movements have been extensively scrutinized in previous research, the visual dimension of their communication has remained comparatively under-explored, particularly the interplay between textual and visual elements. We adopt a mixed-method multimodal computational approach, combining image classification with topic modeling. This approach enables a systematic analysis of large image-text datasets, allowing us to classify image clusters and examine their variations over time. This approach is combined with in-depth qualitative analysis. For this study, we have collected 13,000 images, along with their accompanying texts, from dominant actors within the Swedish countermovement.
Anton Törnberg is an Associate Professor in Sociology and employed as a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. In his research, Anton Törnberg combines different methods within machine learning such as topic modeling, word embedding, and sentiment analysis along with qualitative text analysis to study large amounts of digital data. He also combines social network analysis with text analysis to study how concepts and discourses spread in digital networks.