Abstract
1. Background: While many studies analyze the functions that images can fulfill during humanitarian crises or catastrophes, an understanding of how meaning is constructed in text–image relationships is lacking. This article explores how discourses are produced using different types of text–image interactions. It presents a case study focusing on a humanitarian crisis, more specifically the sexual transmission of Ebola. 2. Methods: Data were processed both quantitatively and qualitatively through a keyword-based selection. Tweets containing an image were retrieved from a database of 210,600 tweets containing the words “Ebola” and “semen”, in English and in French, over the course of 12 months. When this first selection was crossed with the imperative of focusing on a specific thematic (the sexual transmission of Ebola) and avoiding off-topic text–image relationships, it led to reducing the corpus to 182 tweets. 3. Results: The article proposes a four-category classification of text–image relationships. Theoretically, it provides original insights into how discourses are built in social media; it also highlights the semiotic significance of images in expressing an opinion or an emotion. 4. Conclusion: The results suggest that the process of signification needs to be rethought: Content enhancement and dialogism through images have a bearing on Twitter’s use as a public sphere, such as credibilization of discourses or politicization of events. This opens the way to a new, more comprehensive approach to the rhetorics of users on Twitter.
Highlights
Images are a powerful vector of signification that social media users resort to more and more. it seems evident that understanding text–image relationships is of great importance to grasping the full meaning of any message, it is too common to read studies aboutTwitter in which tweets are treated exclusively as text data or, more rarely, as platforms for sharing visuals
The results suggest that the process of signification needs to be rethought: Content enhancement and dialogism through images have a bearing on Twitter’s use as a public sphere, such as credibilization of discourses or politicization of events
It seems evident that understanding text–image relationships is of great importance to grasping the full meaning of any message, it is too common to read studies about
Summary
Images are a powerful vector of signification that social media users resort to more and more. it seems evident that understanding text–image relationships is of great importance to grasping the full meaning of any message, it is too common to read studies aboutTwitter in which tweets are treated exclusively as text data or, more rarely, as platforms for sharing visuals. The strategies developed by users to make their discourses more visible are often based on images, which makes, in the words of Barthes [6], the ‘relay’ relationship (when texts add information to images) more frequent than the ‘anchorage’ relationships (when texts fix the meaning), encouraging researchers to explore its variations on social media. Many articles base their visual corpus on extractions of images coming from social networks. When this first selection was crossed with the imperative of focusing on a specific thematic (the sexual transmission of Ebola) and avoiding off-topic text–image relationships, it led to reducing the corpus to 182 tweets
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