Drawing Networks of Political Leaders: Global Affairs in The Economist’s KAL’s Cartoons

Abstract

Analysis of political cartoons as multimodal metaphors requires a complex set of methods and techniques to be incorporated into a research project. We believe that network analysis could help to explore the explicit and implicit meanings of this type of text, especially in a case of drawings based on world politics topics. To introduce our approach to building networks from visual metaphors and to demonstrate essential issues connected with its coding we have taken cartoons created by Kevin ‘KAL’ Kallaugher, one of the premier modern caricaturists. In this paper, our data consist of 50 images published in 2018 in The Economist’s special section “The World this Week,” which is dedicated to the most important events in global affairs. The main aim of our paper was to show a research design that allows us to turn pictures of political leaders into a multilayer international relations network inconspicuously drawn by an artist frame by frame within a year. We have also found that the use of multiplex networks allows to capture patterns of interactions in a very explicit manner and brings many benefits to qualitative research that deals with specific issues, such as Brexit or Eurocentrism.