Exploring the identity construction of IS members through linguistic markers in online discourse

Project Information

ISICD

Grant agreement ID: 882556

DOI

10.3030/882556

Project closed

EC signature date 21 February 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 160 932,48

EU contribution

€ 160 932,48

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD DE GRANADA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ISICD (Exploring the identity construction of IS members through linguistic markers in online discourse)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ISICD has explored the discourse of the Islamic State (IS) as well as other Islamic extremist groups and acheived the main aim of contributing to a system of detecting, tracking and monitoring radicalization on the Internet. Specifically, the findings from the ISCID project provide a much-needed comprehensive account of the linguistic markers that characterize extremist online identity, as manifested through the different personae members construe when communicating with their target audiences. The contribution is methodological, theoretical and topical, having the potential to influence research in other non-linguistic academic fields, and raise awareness amongst other public bodies such as police and border force control as well as the wider public.

The overall aim of ISICD has been to explore the discursive representation and identity construction of IS groups online through a set of four specific objectives (O):
O1 how extremism is identified within language use through quantitative analysis of n-grams, word sketches and collocations;
O2 how extremism is identified through qualitative structural patterns (i.e transitivity and appraisal frameworks).
O3 how the use of these linguistic traits explains rhetoric and persuasive strategies used by IS;
O4 what these findings tell us about how IS ideology is filtered through various discursive practices.

An additional line of research within the project is the analysis of police interviews with community members known to individuals convicted of terrorism. This forms part of a collaboration with members of “Nutcracker: System for the detection, tracking, monitoring and analysis of terrorist discourse on the Internet” (FFI2016-79748-R), a project funded by MINECO and directed by Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio and Juan Luis Castro Peña from the University of Granada. The research is relevant in a number of academic disciplines as well as day-to-day contexts. Radicalisation, for example, is at the extreme end of what is a highly complex cline of influence and manipulation of one’s ideology or belief system, and as the use of online communication (social media, vlogging, live streams, news comments and threads, etc.) becomes more pervasive, we become more exposed to the use of opinionated language, fake news, and propaganda in a range of domains and text communities. The research project has established original and quantitative methodologies for analyzing online communication, with the intention of better understanding the ways in which ideology is articulated and distributed in the 21st century and how this can lead to radicalization in online communities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

PUBLICATIONS
• Patterson, K. J. 2022. ‘Dualisms in Jihad: The role of metaphor in creating ideological dichotomies’. Journal of Language Agression and Conflict, pp.1-22 (Online First). .DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00075.pat.
Metrics: JCR Impact factor: 2.00 H-index: 13 SJR: 0.643; Linguistics and Language: Q1

• Patterson, K. J. 2022. ‘Under the Shadow of Swords: The Rhetoric of Jihad. A corpus based critical analysis of religious metaphors in jihadist magazines’. Pragmatics and Society, 13(3), pp. 477-500. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21017.pat.
Metrics: JCR Impact Factor: 0.70 IF; H-index: 12; SJR: 0.231; Linguistics and Language: Q2

• Pace-Sigge, M. & Patterson, K. J. 2022. ‘The idea of power-relations. How forced primings appear in jihadist magazines’. Pragmatics and Society, 13(3), pp. 404-430. https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.21015.pat.
Metrics: JCR Impact Factor: 0.70 IF; H-index: 12; SJR: 0.231; Linguistics and Language: Q2

• Patterson, K. 2020. The path to Jihad: A critical metaphor analysis of religious conceptualisations in jihadist magazines. Cambridge Open Engage. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33774/coe-2020-nc1d5.
Metrics: JCR Impact Factor: 0.70 IF; H-index: 12; SJR: 0.231

• Benítez-Castro, M. Á., Hidalgo-Tenorio, E., Patterson, K. & I. González Jiménez (en preparación). “Gender, Appraisal Theory and Extremism”. Language in Society.
Metrics: JCR Impact Factor: 2.38. Q1

• Benítez-Castro, M. Á., Hidalgo-Tenorio, E., Patterson, K. & I. González Jiménez (en preparación). “El Caso de Ripoll: Persuasión Coercitiva vs. Persuasión Emotiva”. Comunicar.
Metrics: JCR Impact Factor: 5.440. Q1



CONFERENCE PAPERS

• Language, Law and Justice Workshop, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada (18-20/05/2022)
Paper Title: Violent radicalisation through the lens of appraisal theory: one case study.

• 3rd Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis (ADDA 3) Conference, St Petersburg, Florida (13-15/05/2022).
Paper Title: Persuasion and hyperbole on the path to Jihad: A discourse analysis of religious metaphor in online extremist propaganda.

• Discourse, Politics and Extreme Ideologies Workshop, Universidad de Granada (03-05/05/2022)
Paper Title: No eran radicales, incluso cuando cometieron aquello que hicieron: or an appraisal analysis of the circle of the Ripoll cell.

• 14th Annual Researching and Applying Metaphors, Vilnius University, Lithuania (23-26/06/2021).
Paper Title: Dualism in Jihadism: The role of metaphor in promoting dichotomous worldviews.

• 4th Cambridge Language Sciences Symposium, University of Cambridge (23/11/2020).
Paper Title: The path to Jihad: A critical metaphor analysis of religious conceptualisations in jihadist magazines.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Together with Professor Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio and Dr Miguel Ángel Benítez Castro (University of Zaragoza), the researcher is collaborating with psychologists Dr Manuel Moyano and Irene González at the University of Cordoba to further the cross-discipline strands of the project. Creation of a new Appraisal system based on model of Martin and White (2005), Bednarek (2008), and Benítez-Castro and Hidalgo-Tenorio (2019) is also currently underway. The aim is to be able to categorize emotion and evaluation within discourse to gain better insight into the psychology of those who have been or are at risk of radicalization (notions of identity; belonging; emotion). The current interrater reliability tests implemented are very promising, showing that there is an agreement between the raters reaching 0.85 out of 1 (see Fuoli, 2018).

The researcher is also currently writing a proposal for an edited volume that will celebrate the best papers from the Discourse, Politics and Ideology workshop that was organised at the University of Granada in May this year, and funded by the ISCID project. Some of the contributors are leading academics in their fields (psychology, discourse analysis, social/political sciences, security studies, artificial intelligence, and corpus and computational linguistics).

Finally, as a larger project team, we expect that the software that is still currently under development will be able to be made available to border/Police forces, in order to assist in the detection of those who are both spreading extremist propaganda/content, and those as risk of becoming radicalised as a result of its pervasive presence in a number of online channels (Twitter, facebook, Youtube, propaganda magazines etc).

Conference flyer for social media