Dr Gustavo Góngora-Goloubintseff presents research on Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Wikipedia at Warwick seminar series

Posted on 6 November 2023

Dr Gustavo Góngora-Goloubintseff, Associate Lecturer in our department, has recently taken part in the Warwick Seminar Series presenting research on Multimodal Discourse Analysis.

Dr Gustavo Góngora-Goloubintseff, Associate Lecturer in our department, has recently taken part in the Warwick Seminar Series presenting research on Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The talk was entitled: The Falklands/Malvinas War taken to Wikipedia: What can Multimodal Discourse Analysis tell us about neutrality in the world’s largest encyclopædia?

The talk raises points from several past studies on Wikipedia that the ideological stance of the authors is known to pose challenges to neutrality, often leading to “edit wars” that ultimately cast doubts on Wikipedia’s credibility when presenting seemingly controversial subjects. By taking the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy at the centre, this research is one of the first to apply multimodal discourse analysis to tackle cross-lingual violations of the Neutral Point of View (NPOV).

The data set used in the research consisted of the introductory sections, table of contents and images from the two Wikipedia entries (Spanish and English) from the Falklands/Malvinas war and a set of selected comments posted on their talk pages. The findings suggest that specific lexical and visual choices are ideologically motivated and go against the principles advocated by NPOV. This is further attested by the fact that some lexical choices are contested by Wikipedia editors on the talk pages, thus showing that neutrality in the user-driven encyclopaedia is a relative and local position.

The recording is available here.