INCONVENIENT TRUTH Al Gore - Man On The Street, by filmmaker Rollie Williams, doesn’t feature the politician himself, but does expose America’s lack of education on climate breakdown
MB: We do some of that.We’ve been working on a project using topic modelling, and that can help with larger datasets, but there are limits to some of that work. Manual coding helps you really get into the subtleties. And we have a practice of using two or more independent coders, because when you see discrepancies, you can talk about them and how their interpretations are different. There’s definitely a lot of software out there. I personally use NVivo, which is a way to get at word frequency considerations and associations. FEED: Do you use AI or additional digital tools in your analyses?
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FEED: What are some of the new ways media outlets can approach creating content around climate change?
MB: In television, imagery plays such an important and powerful role. I wrote a book a few years ago called Creative (Climate) Communications . More and more, I’ve been experimenting, and studying how entertainment media – and other creative forms of communication – can help spark and sustain conversations that will lead to greater action on climate and environment. We’ve even been experimenting
on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and Saturday Night Live , and Chuck Nice, who co-hosts StarTalk with Neil deGrasseTyson. Of course, there are always risks, appearing to trivialise very important, critical challenges of our time. And we’re mindful of that.There are challenges of potentially distracting without purpose, without a message. Most comedians are probably happy for people just to have a
with comedy. I partnered with Beth Osnes, who is a professor of theatre at our university. She had done a lot of work
good chuckle and go home. But what we were trying to do was get
“WE’VE BEEN EXPERIMENTINGWITH COMEDY AS A VEHICLE FOR COMMUNICATION AND ENGAGEMENT”
people to laugh and think, fully and differently, about some incongruencies, or the many contradictions that we live with in a world of changing climate. As our project evolved, we partnered with a group called Project Drawdown, who have some top solutions on climate change. We asked our comedians and students to somehow tether their humorous piece with one of those solutions. When embarking on this several years ago, there weren’t many doing this work. Now, it’s growing. In the US, during the UN General Assembly in September, the late-night shows came together to cover climate themes. So, this is a way of doing things that are creative and developing more than just a news story.
on performance and the history of comedy.We partnered up to think about how to approach climate change, and reach audiences who otherwise wouldn’t engage with a dry peer review paper, or even a media account. We worked with our students to create content, then analysed that content. As time went on, we started an international short video competition about comedy and climate change through a project called Inside the Greenhouse. It’s been interesting to get submissions from around the world, to see different cultural interpretations. In the pandemic, we collaborated with underemployed comedians.We turned our classrooms into little breakout writers’ rooms with these people, who have worked
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