Multifactorial Parallel Text Analysis of Media Texts

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference starts with Stefan Hauser and Martin Luginbühl, whose focus is on textual analysis. Their background is in linguistics, and they are interested in moving beyond the idea that culture, language, nation, and territory form one unproblematic entity – more promising is a more flexible definition by which cultures articulate themselves along a variety of dimensions.

They take a praxeological understanding of culture, therefore: respecting the performative as well as semiotic dimension; taking culture as a category of both content and form; and seeing language as a reflection on spatial affiliation as well as a means of creating space. This connects to contrastive textology, which through parallel text analysis (the comparison of parallel textual corpora) has shown that genres vary according to national and language borders.

But in such approaches it often remains highly unclear what is being compared; this needs to be addressed. It is necessary to find and apply additional comparative methodologies, therefore. Similarly, comparative advertising analysis positions advertising and marketing strategies as globally applicable, as well as locally adapted; this variously leads to processes of deterritorialisation, a reinvention of differences, or glocalisation.

Multifactorial parallel text analysis may help here. In the present project, texts in German, French, and Italian from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy were compared; these are texts which exist between globalisation and localisation (from transnational companies and international NGOs, and mass media texts reporting on the same international event).

Key trends identified include homogenisation (where texts are closely equivalent across the different nations and languages – as in product information for consumer goods, for example); glocalisation (where the text structure is homogenised, but the content is nationally specific); localisation, type 1 (where there are nation-specific variations of the texts – differences between Germany and German-speaking Switzerland, for example); localisation, type 2 (where the variations are according to language areas, rather than national identity – e.g. differences between German- and French-speaking Switzerland, but similarities between Germany and German-speaking Switzerland).

Beyond this, more broadly there may also exist additional differences at a larger level – for example between European- and US-style news reporting, even in spite of internal European differences. This demonstrates the potential of multifactorial parallel text analysis, which identifies a range of spaces of media practice beyond and within specific nation states.