The Role of Text-Type and Genre in the Analysis of Subtitles: Towards Measuring How Green the Media Are

Abstract

The United Nations agency UNESCO issued in 2009 the Paris Declaration on Broadcast Media and Climate Change: A Public Service Remit where the role of communication was underlined as vital in informing and educating the public about the realities of climate change and the costs of inaction. Citizens are informed of the environmental crisis through media channels. By integrating the topic of sustainability into all television programming, from children’s programmes to reality TV shows, we can elevate this once-peripheral issue to a prominent position in the public consciousness. Understanding, measuring, and effectively reporting the degree to which the topic of sustainability is featured in broadcast media is challenging (McDonagh and Orero forthcoming). While some analyses and methodologies exist, these can be difficult to implement and time-consuming. Currently, there are no automatic tools to measure large language-based broadcast corpus data. Some companies have developed their own private methodology. Seeking to remedy this critical oversight, the goal of this paper is to propose the use of subtitles as a tool and explain the singularity of subtitles as a text type. At present subtitles are already used to mine information, which is the second part of the article. As a text type, subtitles features need to be taken into consideration. The final part defines the objective of our research: to use subtitles as a metric to measure the frequency, topic coverage, and accessibility of sustainability-related content in television. By drawing on subtitling data, we can measure the degree to which sustainability is discussed and presented in the wider broadcast mediascape. These data are expected to be instrumental in drafting reports, guidelines, and recommendations on sustainability for broadcasting in the region with the possibility of influencing national and international policy. By using subtitles as measurable raw data to develop metrics to gauge the quantity of sustainability-related content in broadcast television, we can better understand how climate change is currently covered. Armed with this knowledge, we can develop strategies and benchmarks to promote sustainability as a concept and contribute towards Net Zero targets.