Full Title: Look Who's Talking: Voices and Sources in the News.
Short Title: WHOTALKS

Date: 12-Dec-2024 - 13-Dec-2024
Location: Brussels, venue TBA, Belgium
Contact Person: Martina Temmerman
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://www.vub.be/en/event/voices-and-sources-in-news

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Translation

Call Deadline: 30-Jun-2024

Meeting Description:

Having established a solid reputation in research into journalism theory and journalism practice, the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies (BIJU) is proud to launch its fifth call for papers for a new international conference. The topic for this year will be voices and sources in the news. As always, our conference is multidisciplinary. We invite scholars from different backgrounds like communication and media studies, conversation and discourse analysis, (cognitive) linguistics, translation studies, speech technology, epistemology and political and social sciences to share their insights with us on which voices and sources are heard in the news, and on how their words are represented.

Call for Papers:

Studying voices and sources in the news can be done empirically from many different angles. From a linguistic point of view, studying the voices and the sources in a given text comes down to studying the evidentiality expressed in the text. Evidentiality is the linguistic category which gives shape to perception, proof and evidence. While the formal designation of evidentiality may vary widely among languages, evidential meanings are universally expressed in all languages. We can say that evidentiality indicates the source of information of the speakers/writers, what speakers/writers base their knowledge on and how certain speakers/writers are of that knowledge.

From a journalistic point of view, studying evidentiality in a text makes us aware of the sources cited in the text. The study of reported speech and quoting is important to explain which voices are present in the news and how they are represented. Register also plays a role here, for example to examine how journalists deal with hate speech and rude speech.

Combining multiple disciplinary angles, it is relevant to look at the journalist's own voice and study how perception and other sources of knowledge are linguistically represented, and how certainty and reliability are expressed. Additionally, the language of fake news and the role AI and speech technology play in it are other possible topics for this conference.

Furthermore, as news sources are often international and interlingual, translation and interpreting processes in news production are of interest for this conference as well. How may translation, voiceover, dubbing or subtitling affect the news content, and do they increase or decrease the number of voices that are heard, are questions that could be addressed.
With this wide variety of possible approaches in mind, we invite participants to engage in a critical discussion of voices and sources in journalism, trying to answer questions like: whose voices sound the loudest in the public debate, which sources are quoted most often, does the traditional journalistic method of including multiple sources guarantee balanced reporting, how can voices and sources be rendered linguistically and/or visually, how is the perception of the journalist expressed linguistically, what are linguistic tools to indicate certainty and (source) reliability, are there any linguistic tools for identifying fake news, and what are legitimate applications of AI for journalism?

We welcome submissions from all relevant disciplinary backgrounds approaching the central theme of ‘voices and sources in the news’ from a conceptual, empirical or methodological perspective; using quantitative and qualitative methods, or a mixed-methods design; and looking into journalism practices, products, or audiences.

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

Source diversity and source hierarchies in the era of digital journalism
Plurivocity and ‘multiperspectivism’ in contemporary news reporting/journalism
Factors and processes affecting voice/source silence versus salience in journalism
Voice/sources and ‘alternative’, ‘ambient’, or ‘interpretive’ journalism
Voice/source diversity, objectivity and fairness
Transparency in journalism
Voice/source diversity in journalism and knowledge production
Journalistic voice and institutional roles from a global perspective
Voice/source (in)visibility and social/environmental justice or identity politics
Voice/sources in journalism, listening and exposure diversity
Hate speech and rude speech in journalism
Linguistic devices for expressing evidentiality in journalism
The translation of foreign-speaking voices in the news
The expression of voice in visual and artistic journalism
The language of fake news
Human-AI collaboration in journalism
(Diverse) voices in AI-generated content
AI and source authentication
Voices behind the algorithms
Innovative methodologies for the study of voice/sources in journalism