Beaches, Buzzwords and Branding: Publicising Coastal Sustainability Projects in the Arts and Humanities (Part 1)

‘Creative Writing Against Coastal Waste’ is encouraging the development of fresh narratives about the ocean, coastal spaces and local waste reduction in a variety of ways. For example, innovative narratives will be the core outcome of our planned creative writing workshops in collaboration with ArtfulScribe; they will be sparked by the conversations at our forthcoming Lightning Talks event; and arise from our In Conversation interviews with experts in the field. The role of key terms, titles, and visuals within these narrative contexts is emerging as a thought-provoking question for us all.

With this in mind, the Creative Writing Against Coastal Waste project team has conducted some research into the kinds of messaging that are most common among similar projects. This process in itself has the potential to bring another kind of narrative into relief: one that reveals the remarkable network of arts and humanities initiatives that are taking place along the South Coast, often with complementary aims, emphases and outcomes.

This post considers how we might synthesise data about these different coastal initiatives in a way that can be useful for arts and humanities projects engaging with coastal waste, ocean literacy and the climate crisis. The visualisations presented in what follows use a simple corpus linguistics tool, Voyant, to analyse the titles and mission statements of fifty initiatives that are taking place—or have recently taken place—along the stretch of coastline between Plymouth and Brighton. Plain text versions of these project titles and mission statements were entered into Voyant to generate word clouds and concordance data that can be used to enhance our understanding of how these projects shaped their messages to funders and to the public, as well as illuminating their shared strategies.

While this might seem an ideal way to spark discussions about project branding, there are of course some caveats to this approach and the software that it uses. Voyant is a relatively basic tool, in that it often treats individual datapoints as lengthy run-on sentences and can fail to account for certain creative nuances. For example, in our title data sample, Voyant misses the interdisciplinary palimpsest created by the irregular capitalisation of the project title ‘wAteR climaTe’. Therefore, while this research cannot provide evidence of hard statistical trends in project branding, or act as a substitute for manual data analysis, it can make some targeted suggestions about what kinds of narratives seem to be circulating between these projects along the South Coast and speculate about what that might mean for effective messaging strategies.

The first level of our analysis involved inputting the titles of fifty South Coast projects into Voyant to generate a word cloud and some simple frequency data (see Image 1). This data revealed that the most common terms included ‘climate’ (ten appearances), ‘ocean’ (four appearances) and ‘plastic’ (four appearances). While it is important not to overgeneralise with a relatively small dataset, it is nonetheless interesting that, regardless of the specific issue at stake in each project, the overarching idea of ‘climate’ and ‘climate change’ is frequently at the centre of the branding. The same can be said for ‘plastic’, which may suggest that many of these projects focus on engaging their audiences by referring to the aspects of ocean sustainability that are rendered most visible by the media. [1]

Several projects appeared multiple times during our searches because they used two or more of the top buzzwords, alongside other evocative keywords, in their titles. This was the case for the Plymouth-based project ‘Song of the Sea: Listening to Climate Change in Action’ and the Exeter-led ‘High Water: Tides, Climates, Oceans and the Exe Estuary’. It is telling that the first project is led by a Higher Education Institution, and the second is a conference, which suggests the multiple key terms are present to emphasise the searchability of the projects in online fora.

Analysing the project mission statements reinforced the prominence of the terms ‘climat*’ (sixty six appearances), and ‘chang*’ (fifty-eight appearances), as shown in Image 2. [2] However, since mission statements allow project teams more space for elaboration than titles, there was also a high frequency of words we are terming ‘value judgements’. For example, the word ‘new*’ and its variations occurred twenty-eight times, with ‘creativ*’ making thirty-six appearances. This emphasis is in-keeping with funding bodies’ prioritisation of originality, ‘newness’ and impact agendas.

One of Voyant’s most useful features is its ability to visualise word concordances, or place specific key terms in their contexts. This is a particularly helpful way to avoid overgeneralising about terms that might appear in multiple contexts. For example, the term ‘creative’ is not simply used in the context of ‘creative writing’, but becomes applicable to a range of disciplines, as Image 3 shows. [3] Likewise, ‘creative writing’ itself is often framed in different ways by these projects – referred to as ‘stories’, ‘storytelling’ and crucially, ‘narrative’

While by no means an exhaustive method of analysing project branding data, we can nonetheless draw three tentative conclusions from this research: first the language of the climate crisis can often be found at the centre of many of these initiatives, regardless of the specific issues under discussion. Second, the idea of the ‘creative’ transcends the idea of creative writing in these projects and is applied to a variety of disciplines – it might therefore be used as a node capable of drawing several disciplinary approaches together. Finally, these studies attend carefully to their originality and ‘newness’ as much as their connectedness to other issues and debates.

In Part 2, of this themed post, we will move away from key words to evaluate recent work on visuals, particularly the recent uptick in the number of scholarly articles discussing the pros and cons of using charismatic species as logos for environmental initiatives.

[1] See for example this recent BBC article, which incorporates both issues: ‘Climate Change: Don't sideline plastic problem, nations urged’, BBC News, 28 September 2021 [Accessed: 08/07/2022].

[2] In digital search tools, the asterisk tells Voyant to return results for all possible word endings. This is known as a ‘wildcard’ search. For example, the term ‘chang*’ returns all results including the word ‘change’, ‘changes’, ‘changing’, ‘changed’ and so forth.

[3] Note that the context for each of these collocations was set to five words either side of the keyword, to maximise the amount of data while minimising false collocations that can be returned because Voyant treats the separate mission statements as one text.

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Beaches, Buzzwords and Branding: Publicising Coastal Sustainability Projects in the Arts and Humanities (Part 1)