In the Language Bank: Gwenaëlle Bauvois

Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Gwenaëlle Bauvois tells us how about her research based on various media data sources, including the Plenary Sessions of the Parliament of Finland obtained via Kielipankki.

Who are you?

I am a researcher at the University of Helsinki based at the at the , University of Helsinki. I hold a PhD in Sociology.

What is your research topic?

I am interested in right-wing populism, countermedia, reinformation, hybrid media and post-truth. My interest in these phenomena was really sparked in 2015 after the Charlie Hebdo events, and I have been working on these topics since then.

In the years 2016–2019, I and my colleagues and were involved in a research project called . We studied how countermedia mobilizes a “disenfranchised” community of people who are losing trust in the mainstream media. ’Countermedia’ refers to partisan media that oppose conventional media and the establishment. For this project, we collected data from online media located in Finland, France and the United States.

Some of the results of our project were published in our co-authored article (2019). In this paper, we set out to investigate whether countermedia style is also used in the arena of ‘high politics’ – in this case the Parliament of Finland – and if so, how and by whom. The results of our computational and qualitative analysis of media data from Helsingin Sanomat and MV Lehti (2015–2017) and of the (years 2015–2016) showed that countermedia style expressions are indeed used in parliamentary debates, especially by the populist right-wing Finns Party, during debates on the ”refugee crisis”.

How is your research related to Kielipankki?

As one of our data sets for this research, we used the minutes of the (years 2015v2016), provided by the Language Bank of Finland. The selected subset of the data contains the full transcripts of 183 parliamentary sessions and 6819 speeches that we analyzed computationally and qualitatively.

Publications related to Kielipankki

Tuukka Ylä-Anttila, Gwenaëlle Bauvois & Niko Pyrhönen (2019). . Discourse, Context & Media 32: 1–8.

The  consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources.  is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.