CDMM Research Notes are written by members and affiliates of the Centre for Digital Methods and Media, PhD and Postdoctoral researchers as well as students.
The research notes are short research reports that present digital method development and application to current research in media and communication studies. They can be work in progress and are intended for students or researchers as inspiration for developing their own approaches. They are not double-blind peer-reviewed but each report is reviewed by at least one member of CDMM.
No liability on the side of CDMM or AU can be assumed for employing the approaches or code shared along with these publications. Changes in software or code are likely to occur since publication.
CDMM Research Notes are available in free PDF editions.
The French Alternative Influence Network: Affective Mobilisation, Multimodal Strategies and Audience Engagement, by Manon Raynaud, Christoph Raetzsch, 2026.
Abstract: In 2024, France’s far-right party achieved historical election outcomes reshaping the country’s political landscape. In this research note, we present an exploratory study of a French Alternative Influence Network (AIN) on YouTube which acts as an ecosystem of creators and audiences using humour, affect and collaboration to reshape political discourse. Based on the model of political influencer networks identified by Lewis (2018) in an Anglophone context, we employ Youtube Data Tools and Orange Data Mining to develop a triangulated mixed-method combining multimodal visual-verbal video analysis (Fazeli et al. 2023), sentiment analysis (Liu 2012) and video engagement metrics (Munger and Phillipps 2022) to capture the interplay between visual rhetoric, emotional tone and audience engagement within a sample of French far-right YouTube content. The analysis uses four prime data sources: transcripts of video content, qualitative coding of visual-verbal video elements, user comments on the videos and engagement metrics. The analysis develops in two phases: (1) Based on a purposive sample of ten videos, we develop a prototype and workflow for the analysis. (2) With the prototype we replicate the analysis for another 20 videos.
Findings show that content creators in this network rely on multimodal strategies to reframe mainstream media content and emphasise a nationalistic frame to engage and mobilise their audiences even though they refrain from supporting particular parties or openly voice political ideologies.
Get Research Note 1 here.
The .ows data file with the workflow from Research Note 1 was created and can be read in Orange Data Mining (version 3.40)
The workflow file may be downloaded here.
The Creative Commons license following the file is here.
Read more on the tools used in Research notes here: Orange Data Mining, YouTube Data Tools, YouTube to Transcripts
