I concluded early in the course that I would produce an essay for my final asset, or at least something that had some basis in academic writing. However, in one of the tutorials we were given some time to be creative at a task that was pretty far outside of my comfort zone so I spent the first few minutes trying to think back on what creative outlets I had previously explored and eventually a memory from when I was in primary school came back to me where I had created some digital art representing pictures using words, much like a shaped word cloud. From here I started looking at one of the Guardian articles I had been reading and began taking out key words from the article with the aspiration that I would create something out of them. In the end I ran out of time and didn’t return to that particular project, but instead I decided that I would do it as my asset. It formulated into an attempt to look at what different media outlets conveyed in their articles and then distilling that data into a piece of art. I was quite happy with this idea, and I hoped that through it I would be able to create images that would be reflections of how different media companies presented climate change on their platform. To start out I wrote a program that would read the html from a website, filter out anything that wasn’t a word and then sort the words by frequency. I then had to decide what articles to include. My main objective in this project was to compare the portrayal of climate change in the Guardian and the Telegraph so I started by looking at those two papers. From here I decided that I would limit it further to level the playing ground between the two and consequently limited it to just opinion pieces that reflected on the aftermath of COP26.”

 

Christopher Forsey

Economics

Undergraduate, Year 2

Edinburgh, Scotland

Currents 2021

 

The first piece by Christopher Forsey. It features blue, white and red coloured words written vertically on a black background.

 

The second piece by Christopher Forsey. It features black words on a white background. The words are displayed in a hourglass shape, with sand in it.

 

Bibliography

Guardian Piece

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2021/nov/13/the-observer-view-on-the-cop26-agreement

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/15/cop-26-agreement-victories-global-economy-climate-crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/the-guardian-view-on-the-cop26-agreement-unfinished-buinsess

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/15/empty-words-no-action-cop26-has-failed-first-nations-people

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/14/cop26-last-hope-survival-climate-civil-disobedience

https://showyourstripes.info/s/globe

Telegraph Piece

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/15/glasgow-need-net-zero-referendum/