Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The media coverage of information in the digital public sphere is a phenomenon that helps explain how public opinion is shaped in society. This research project seeks to understand the role of digital media in the construction of a collective imaginary of peace or violence, based on a study about the Colombian peace process media coverage. The use of research methods based exclusively on digital big data allows not only a quantitative analysis of the corpus (websites, tweets), but also a visual representation of the collective worldview in very large populations, examining the nature and form of the text as an image of representation, using: web cartographies, dendrograms, word clouds and factorial correspondences analysis. The diachronic analysis of these digital traces, created over time, will also allow to understand the modalities of constitution of this imaginary. The anteriority of this phenomenon in Colombia, and particularly the gradual transition from an imaginary of violence to one of peace, with their own characteristics, starting with their contemporary character and the more intensive use of digital media to identify the specific role of said usage. For this particular research project, the comments left by users in media websites, the social networks Twitter and Facebook will be used collectively. All the comments on each of the platforms will be mixed through lexicometric analysis and in this case it will be studied using purely textual computer analysis and visual tools, to have a visualization of fhe cognitive perception, seeing the text as image.