John Morley
Introduction: The IntUne Project
This research was funded by a grant from the INTUNE project (Integrated and United: A quest for Citizenship in an ever closer Europe) financed by the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Union, Priority 7, Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge Based Society (CIT3-CT-2005-513421)

IntUne (Integrated and United: A Quest for Citizenship in an ever closer Europe) is one of the few Integrated Projects on the theme of “Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge Based Society” financed by the European Union within the scope of the Sixth Framework Programme. The project is coordinated by the University of Siena and will last four years starting from September 1st 2005. There are 29 European Institutions and over 100 scholars across Central and Western Europe involved. The project is multidisciplinary by nature and calls on scholars and practitioners from different fields of study: political science, sociology, public policy, media, linguistics and socio-psychology.

The aim of the project is to study the changes in the scope, nature and characteristics of citizenship which result from the political and geographical enlargement of the European Union. The project focuses on how processes of integration, at both national and European levels, affect the three major dimensions of citizenship: identity, representation and the scope of good governance. Problems of citizenship are addressed under this threefold approach by looking at the relationship between the general public and elite groups and between the European and the domestic dimensions of political life.

The scholars involved in the project are divided into four Working Groups which study the behaviour of (a) elite groups (b) groups of experts (c) the ordinary citizen and (d) the media at national and European levels. In order to avoid the four groups working in isolation the project has created three transversal Issue Areas to which different members of all the four Working Groups are assigned. The Issue Areas are Identity, Representation and Scope of Governance.

The Media Working Group, of which we are members, is composed of linguists from the Universities of Siena and Bologna in Italy, Cardiff and Brighton in Great Britain, the University of Lorient (South Brittany) in France and Łodz in Poland. Most of the Media Working Group come from backgrounds of Corpus Linguistics, Hallidayan Grammar and / or classical Discourse Studies. Our main scientific activities are the collection and analysis for training purposes of a small Pilot Corpus of newspaper and television texts from the four countries to which we belong. After this, and more importantly, we will collect, mark up and analyse two larger corpora, known as the Main Corpora, of television and newspaper texts from the four countries using the experience gained from work on the Pilot Corpus. In order to ensure the integration of our work into the activities of the other three Working Groups, the Main Corpora are being collected at the same time as these groups are conducting Europe-wide surveys concerning attitudes to citizenship among elite groups and ordinary citizens. It is hoped that there will be connections between the key arguments found in the media and the preoccupations of the elite groups and ordinary citizens which will be revealed by the surveys.

In addition to these activities, the Media Working Group will be involved in training young scholars in Corpus Linguistics methodology and theory and their relevance to political analysis and in presenting our findings to European stakeholders: there will be a seminar for stakeholders in Rome in February 2008.

The papers in this collection were all produced as part of the transversal collaboration of the Media Working Group members for the three Issue Areas at the 2006 Annual General Meeting held at Bertinoro.

At the moment, the group is in the process of compiling and marking up the first of the Main Corpora, which contains newspaper and TV texts produced between 12 February and 12 April 2007. The various national sub-corpora will then be sent to the Lorient group for standardization. The group will meet in Bologna at the end of October to present provisional findings based on these sub-corpora. After this, a joint paper will be prepared to illustrate synthetically the Working Group’s research for presentation at the Annual General Meeting at the end of November in Budapest at which representatives of all the institutions involved in the project as well as European Commissioners will be present.

At the stakeholders seminar in Rome in February, we intend to present three keynote papers outlining our main findings and illustrating our methodology.