Militarisation 2.0

The DHI applied concept modelling techniques to a curated corpus of more than 6 million YouTube comments associated with over 1,000 videos in order to examine representations of militarised industries.

The Militarisation 2.0 project examined representations of militarised industries in the form of images and language used by the producers and recipients of social media. By focusing on the producers of “military entertainment” such as video games, the project explored the role of gender, and how social media may perpetuate militaristic values.

Image credit: Call of Duty 4.

The DHI applied concept modelling techniques to a curated corpus of more than 6 million YouTube comments associated with over 1,000 videos. Concept modelling is a computational linguistic process that involves identifying the emergence of concepts, or key ideas, via lexical relationships.

The forthcoming website provides access to the most frequently occurring concept pairs and concept trios used in comments on YouTube videos featuring military content (from a Militarization 2.0 sample). It shows the varying uses of concepts across video genres, maps the use of terms through time, and generates a series of visualisations from this data.

Concept modelling was developed by the University of Sheffield’s School of English and The Digital Humanities Institute as part of the Linguistic DNA project.

Website

Project Team (DHI component)

  • Dr Nick Robinson (Leeds), Dr Marcus Schulzke (York)
  • Method development and linguistic analysis: Dr Iona Hine, Rosie Shute, Dr Seth Mehl
  • Algorithm development and data processing: Matthew Groves
  • Data visualisation interface: Ryan Bloor
  • Data extraction: David Batty (Leeds)
  • Data auditing: Nadia Filippi, Winnie Smith
  • Consultants: Michael Pidd, Prof. Susan Fitzmaurice

Partners

  • University of Leeds

Funders

  • Swedish Research Council