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Heritage as platform

Climate Communication

Over the past few years the tone of the debate around climate change has shifted from sceptical to soberingly urgent as the global community has prioritised the research into solutions which will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. So far this research has been insufficient. One of the major problems for driving public and private stakeholders to implement existing solutions and research new ones is how we communicate about climate change (Stoknes, 2014). There seems to be a lack of common language that drives the scientific community away from policymakers and the public. Due to this lack, it is hard to translate findings into viable and sustainable solutions and to adopt new climate-neutral economies and habits.

Networked images

In her inaugural lecture, Sabine Niederer presents visual methodologies that take into account the contemporary state of digital images and demonstrates how visualizations may be put to use for collaborative research.

The visual vernacular of climate change on Twitter (2016-19)

In this project, we investigated how the visual vernacular of climate change, defined as the platform-specific content and style of images used to articulate climate change, changed on Twitter between 2016-19. Due to the high number of tweets in the dataset, we focused on smaller time-specific samples of tweets as a manageable way to track change over time.

The social media life of climate change

Social media is a transformative digital technology, collapsing the “six degrees ofseparation” which have previously characterized many social networks, and breaking down many of the barriers to individuals communicating with each other. Some commentators suggest that this is having profound effects across society, that social media have opened up new channels for public debates and have revolutionized the communication of prominent public issues such as climate change. In this article we provide the first systematic and critical review of the literature on social media and climate change. We highlight three key findings from the literature: a substantial bias toward Twitter studies, the prevalent approaches to researching climate change on social media (publics, themes, and professional communication), and important empirical findings (the use of mainstream information sources, discussions of “settled science,” polarization, and responses to temperature anomalies).Following this, we identify gaps in the existing literature that should beaddressed by future research: namely, researchers should consider qualitativestudies, visual communication and alternative social media platforms to Twitter.We conclude by arguing for further research that goes beyond a focus on sciencecommunication to a deeper examination of how publics imagine climate changeand its future role in social life.

Using computer vision to see Google’s visual vernacular of climate change (2008-19)

Digital platform research often focuses on a ‘snap- shot’ in time, such as around a critical political event. It is less common, and more challenging due to data restrictions, to look at changes over longer periods of time. In this project, we started to address this gap, investigating how Google’s visual vernacular of cli- mate change has or has not changed using images date-stamped between 2008 and 2019.