The multimodal discursive shift: studying audiovisual political communication through mass sourced and mass pre-analysed short videos in the EP2024 elections

This paper discusses the research undertaken in spring 2024 regarding the European Parliamentary elections, where several transnational consortia engage in comparative research drawing on social media communication, particularly short videos. The paper presents the work of the research group who combine discourse theoretical work with computational analysis. Their prior research on social media on Twitter benchmarked comparative social media research in the EP elections (Herkman and Palonen 2024) and the use of topic modelling in post-foundational discourse theoretical work (Koljonen and Palonen 2021). By 2024 political communication has moved increasingly to audiovisual communication where short videos have a particular value, especially for the younger generations of voting-aged citizens. Taking up this challenge, in transnational comparative context the group has generated data gathering, sharing, pre-analysis practices for data drawn from the rather complex platforms of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. They have moved from the study of the images to multimodal investigation (Salojärvi et al. 2023), and by the time of the presentation generated methods for large datasets that combine qualitative interpretive research with the quantified data that take into account the narrative and auditory aspects of this data. The paper will also discuss the challenges of sourcing and storing social media data for new practices and policies needed for making sure this kind of political communication is analysable now and in the future.