Dr Janina Wildfeuer

Multimodality research has always been part of the Discourse and Communication group at the Center of Language and Cognition, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen. In recent years, the group has grown considerably - and we are proud of being connected across study programmes.

We are an interdisciplinary team dedicated to the understanding of multimodal communication in its broad complexity. By bridging theoretical insights with practical applications, the group focuses on the interplay between different types of communicative modes and data in all aspects of professional and personal communication. Our expertise lies in fields and contexts such as gesture studies, (embodied) conversation/interaction analysis, multimodal design studies for instructional and persuasive discourses, the analysis of generative AI media, multimodal argumentation, or the application and further development of linguistic and semiotic approaches to multimodal communication. We have a profound understanding and knowledge of different media and entertainment forms (including films and TV series, comics, games) and professional text genres (e.g. advertisments, political and news discourses, instructional artefacts); we address socially relevant topics such as hate speech, fake news, and visual or multimodal misinformation as well as problems such as digital accessibility or visual and multimodal literacy.

As working group "Multimodality and AI" under the theme "Language and AI" at the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI, we address questions on the interplay between different types of data and communicative modes that facilitate human-like reasoning and decision-making (e.g. written text, speech recognition, image recognition). This work seeks to contribute to the development of AI systems that not only process multimodal data effectively but are also equipped to tackle real-world challenges such as, e.g., detecting visual misinformation and fake news.

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