Huhtamäki Jukka - Hybrid media events: the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the global circulation of terrorist violence

This book has many beginnings, but one stands out above all others: the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris on 7 January 2015. When news about the shootings began to pour into our social media feeds, we decided straightaway to start compiling research data. We followed the messaging on Twitter and Facebook, we tracked Finnish and international news sources and we witnessed the appearance of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag.

Charlie Hebdo was not a chance selection, nor were we interested in the event simply because of the huge attention it attracted. We had already been researching attention for many years, exploring the creation and circulation of attention in a changed media environment: we wanted to understand how things, notions, ideologies and values come into being and how they exercise an impact and influence on the media through circulation. We had also studied the ways in which different actors participate in and the roles they had in these circulation processes. Furthermore, we shared an interest in the different ways that religion is thematized in the media. For years, Johanna had followed and studied violent media events, while Katjas research interest was focused on the global media circulation of different phenomena. Most of this work was grounded in an ethnographic approach, but in this case we wanted to expand and diversify our methodological toolkit. Our ambitious plan, initially, was to collect all the data from all possible sources, to study circulation patterns from one platform to another and to develop methods that combine an ethnographic approach with computational methods. However, we had neither the funding nor the resources to do this.

We, therefore, decided we should assemble a team, start to write funding applications and narrow our perspective. We were joined by Jukka Huhtamki from Tampere University of Technology, who we had worked with before at the Tampere Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Communication COMET; and by Minttu Tikka, with whom Johanna had collaborated for many years. Throughout the project all of us on the team have shared a common commitment to better understand the changes happening in the media environment and the relationship between media and society in general and to develop the tools and research methods we need to achieve this understanding. This team effort is still ongoing.

Thankfully the funding we needed came very quickly. First, we secured a grant from the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation in 2015, mainly for our project Je suis Charlie The symbolic battle and struggle over attention, which was focused on studying the media attention surrounding the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper. Later, in 2017, the Academy of Finland awarded us funding for a project dealing with the relationship between the media and terrorism more generally. This ongoing project is called Hybrid Terrorizing: Developing a New Model for the Study of Global Media Events of Terrorist Violence (HYTE).

However, even though we had the funding in place, it was not until six months after the events in Paris that we could start compiling the research data. As it turned out, data collection and data administration became a long-drawn-out rigmarole that went on for almost three years. Once we get the chance, we will report on this in greater detail. Based on what we have heard, colleagues in other countries seem to have very similar problems when it comes to accessing and administering large datasets. The problem is particularly difficult in cases where we have to rely for data on commercial service providers which we do in order to gain access to social media datasets.