WHO AM I: STRATEGY OR ACCIDENT? : COMPUTER BASED CONTENTS ANALYSIS OF CARTOONS AND MEMES OF V. ZELENSKY

Abstract

The rapid development of social media in recent years has led to the emergence of new forms of political communication, in particular visual communication, represented by the genres “cartoons” and “memes”. These genres are the subject of many different disciplines: cultural studies, communication/media studies, media linguistics, political science, political linguistics, cognitive linguistics, semiotics. The paper deals with analysis of more than 600 political cartoons and memes of President Zelensky. Methodology includes computer based content analysis (MAXQDA 2018) and multimodal discourse analysis. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for the analysis of multimodal genres not only expands the methodological tools of researchers of humorous discourse, but also ensures the reliability of the results. The caricatures and memes included in the research corpus come from Ukrainian and foreign open sources: (https://www.facebook.com/ PerecRepublic/), (https://www.facebook.com/ProtsyshynOfficial), (https:// www.facebook.com/babaandkit), (https://www.facebook.com/gonimem), (h tt ps: // www.f ac ebo ok .co m/ per sh pri va tn ame ma rny a),(h tt ps :/ / www.radiosvoboda.org/z/752), інтернет-галереї https://janson- karikatur.de/, https://www.cagle.com/, https://www.gocomics.com/comics/ political. A code system consists of formal and semantic codes. Formal codes include “cartoon / meme type” with subcodes “with text”, “without text”, “individual”, “group”, “impersonal” and “hybrid”. The semantic codes in include “humorous techniques” and “levels of communication”, as caricatures and memes are a genre of humorous discourse and at the same time a multimodal text in which verbal and nonverbal components are combined and interact. Any multimodal text of humorous discourse functions in a specific social context, which has been analyzed on the basis of the code “chronotope”, which included the following subcodes: “election campaign and elections”, “inauguration”, “100 days”, “domestic policy”, “foreign policy”, “year in power”. As results of quantitative analysis the individual cartoon/meme type dominates (335 documents), which is 54% of the total number of analyzed documents. Quantitative analysis of humorous techniques showed that the most frequent are satire (62,4 %), association (49,7%), parody (39,2 %) and contradiction (31,3 %). The analysis of political caricatures and memes, which cover certain aspects of Volodymyr Zelensky’s activity as president, showed that his activity was and is the object of rather sharp criticism, which finds its expression in humorous genres.