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Journal of Environmental Media - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2021

Volume 2, Issue 1

Volume 2, Issue 1, 2021

Language: English
  • Short Articles

      • Media representation and gender bias in science

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00036_1

        Research on gender bias in science has often focused on the effects of gender stereotypes or a lack of female role models on the recruitment and retention of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, or on the discrimination women scientists face. Systemic bias fuels, and is cyclically reinforced by, media representations of scientists (who are most often presented as white men). While many proposed interventions to address gender inequality in science focus on changing women’s beliefs or behaviour to help them succeed, more inclusive representation of scientists could meaningfully contribute to reshaping the cultural beliefs that act on both genders to deny women opportunities and produce inhospitable learning and working environments.

  • Articles

      • Topic modelling of public Twitter discourses, part bot, part active human user, on climate change and global warming

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00039_1

        Twitter is a key site for understanding the highly polarized and politicized debate around climate change. We examined large datasets comprising about 15 million tweets from different parts of the world referencing climate change and global warming. Our examination of the twenty most active users employing the term ‘global warming’ are likely to be automated accounts or bots than the most active users employing the term ‘climate change’. We used a mixed method approach including topic modelling, which is a digital method that automatedly identifies the top topics using an algorithm to understand how Twitter users engage with discussions on ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. The percentage of the top 400 users who use the term ‘climate change’ and believe it is human-made or anthropogenic (82.5%) is much higher than users who use the term ‘global warming’ and believe in human causation (25.5%). Similarly, the percentage of active users who use the term ‘global warming’ were much more likely to believe it is a results of natural cycles (18%) than active users who use the term ‘climate change’ (5%). We also identified and qualitatively analysed the positions of the most active users. Our findings reveal clear politically polarized views, with many politicians cited and trolled in online discussions, and significant differences reflected in terminology.

    • Beyond frame analysis: Formal analysis and genre typology in the communication study of short-form environmental video messaging

      Authors: Hunter Vaughan and Lisa Johns
      https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00040_1

      As connected platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok rise in popular use, communication strategies are forced to grow more condensed and to be transmitted primarily across digital screens. Online short-form video has consequently become a primary format for environmental communication, though research on digital communication remains largely limited to frame analysis and discussions of print and still images. Filling a need in current scholarship on environmental media and aiming to further bridge humanities and communication research, this article offers a model for assessing environmentally themed short-form videos that complements communication studies’ focus on messaging rhetoric with humanities-based film and visual culture analytic tools for assessing the connotative aspect of aesthetic and narrative elements. Intending to offer an applicable framework for environmental messengers, we develop a genre system of short-form videos along cognitive and emotional axes that can be quantitatively identified according to formal practices, demonstrated through an examination of four environmental short-form videos.

    • Biodiversity data as public environmental media: Citizen science projects, national databases and data visualizations

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00041_1

      Through a combination of scientific and community activity, our environment is increasingly registered and documented as data. Given the expanding breadth of this digital domain, it is crucial that scholars consider the problems it presents as well as its affirmative potential. This article, arising from collaboration between a practitioner and theorist in digital design and a film and screen scholar with expertise in documentary and environmental studies, critically examines biodiversity data through an ecocritical reading of public-facing databases, citizen science platforms and data visualizations. We examine the ; ; the City of Melbourne’s ; and the experimental visualization . Integrating perspectives from screen studies, design and the environmental humanities, including multispecies studies approaches in anthropology, we examine how digital representations reflect the way biodiversity data is produced and structured. Critically analysing design choices – what is shown, and how it is shown – we argue that biodiversity data on-screen provides specific affordances: allowing, encouraging or discouraging certain insights and possibilities that condition our knowledge of and engagement with living things. An interdisciplinary approach allows us to ask new questions about how users might experience multispecies worlds in digital form, and how biodiversity data might convey the complexities of an entangled biosphere, amplifying understanding, connection and attention amongst interested publics. We examine the visual rhetorics of digital biodiversity in order to better understand how these forms operate as environmental media: designed representations of the living world.

    • Irish energy landscapes on film

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00042_1

      Landscape, and its relation to place identity, is a powerful tool for visualizing and making legible the effects of environmental change. So often the operations of resource consumption and conservation occur in a way that shapes and changes particular regional landscapes. This is significant in an era where inspiring audiences and policy-makers to respond to unsustainable resource use and environmental change is difficult, but where we are still compelled to care for particular elements of place as they relate to identity. In this article we examine how resource use and landscape change are communicated through Irish films, where the interactions of place identity and landscape are central. A key through line argument is how landscape is an important vehicle for expressing anxieties and contexts for resource interdependency; another is how elements of local and regional identity compete and interact with global concerns, such as climate change or globalization, in complex ways. We analyse these interactions to demonstrate how energy resource use and environmental change are linked, highlighting ‘small nation’ tensions concerning geographic identity and resource ownership that are relevant to real-world energy transitions and apply much more broadly.

  • Special Focus: Australia

      • Attuning to the environment through media: Escape and incorporation through fire, plague and video game development software

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00043_1

        This article proposes the possibility of an attunement to the environment through media. The aim of this work is to observe how one might attune and re-tune their consideration of the environment, and environmental issues, through the media they make and consume. It does so by examining the short video , made by Andrew Svanberg Hamilton. The video was crafted in the digital game development software Unreal Engine 4, and this is addressed in part via a discussion of Jean Baudrillard’s work on simulation, considering the idea of a lack of real-world referentials. This lack of geographic specificity is latterly considered through Timothy Morton’s notion of nonlocality, and Marc Augé’s concept of non-places. Primarily, though, a formal analysis of Hamilton’s piece is considered alongside digital game studies research, specifically models of player involvement and the concept of embodied textuality as means of measuring and modelling engagement not just with videogames, but with media more broadly. Hamilton’s video uses elements captured using photogrammetry, but he has replicated these pieces multiple times in order to craft a three-dimensional world. The idea of attunement is drawn from Kathleen Stewart’s work, and is re-offered here as a means of engaging with media and surviving the uncertain times to come. The article considers how a digitally constructed environment might be attuned to by the viewer, through Hamilton’s creation of a world based on memory and sensation, rather than any real-world geographical elements; this emotional resonance is proffered not only as an example of incorporation, but also as a tool for communicating other environmental attunements and issues.

  • Special focus: Australia

      • Indeterminate: Flora, 3D scanning and the instability of data

        https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00044_1

        This article discusses , an environmental media project that explores the possibility of defamiliarizing representational structures of nature through creative practice techniques. Through a reflective, critical analysis of , this article examines how the 3D scanning process, used at the threshold of viability, can illuminate the fragile conditions of data and the complexities of photographic representation. I argue that movements from the plane of environmental forces and forms into a digital materiality carries meaning in addition to signifying practices. This article suggests that viewing environmental photomedia through the lens of posthumanism and materialist philosophy offers the possibility of opening up more-than-representational meanings within materialities, processes, practices and art encounters.

    • Permaculture’s YouTube moment: Learning how to smash the pieces of everyday life in the wake of ecological crises

      https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00045_1

      This article examines ongoing responses to natural disasters such as bushfires, climate change and COVID-19 as articulated in various videos produced for, and distributed via, YouTube. It focuses on channels and content creators that promote ecologically mindful alternative everyday practices explicitly driven by permaculture principles and accompanying notions of resilience as well as individual and community self-reliance. While many of these videos are ostensibly concerned with instructing viewers in small-scale practical food production at a household or small business level, they also mark a renewed critical interest in everyday practices and domestic space as a site of social and cultural change through alternative ways of living. The research employs analytical approaches and frameworks drawn from the disciplines of cultural and media studies, specifically the former’s interest in the notion of ‘everyday life’ and the latter’s engagement with digital platforms such as YouTube. I argue that the permaculture movement’s success on YouTube is indicative of the ways in which the environmental concerns of pre-digital social movements might be adapted to the unique affordances and modes of address of platform media like YouTube and, in particular, its signature form of the vlog. Platform media like YouTube accordingly deserve further scholarly research and a similar level of attention as given to more traditional media forms such as print, film and television in terms of how they might positively enable conceptual and practical responses to ecological crisis at both personal and community levels.

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