Assessing public awareness of social justice documentary films based on news coverage versus social media

Diesner, Jana; Rezapour, Rezvaneh; Jiang, Ming

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89291 Copy

Description

Title

Assessing public awareness of social justice documentary films based on news coverage versus social media

Author(s)

Diesner, Jana; Rezapour, Rezvaneh; Jiang, Ming

Issue Date

2016-03-15

Keyword(s)

• impact assessment
• natural language processing
• topic modeling

Abstract

The comprehensive measurement of the impact that information products have on individuals, groups and society is of practical relevance to many actors, including philanthropic funding organizations. In this paper we focus on assessing one dimension of impact, namely public awareness, which we conceptualize as the amount and substance of attention that information products gain from the press and social media. We are looking at a type of products that philanthropic organizations fund, namely social justice documentaries. Using topic modeling as a text summarization technique, we find that films from certain domains, such as “Politics and Government” and “Environment and Nature,” attract more attention than productions on others, such as “Gender and Ethnicity”. We also observe that film-related public discourse on social media (Facebook and non-expert reviews) has a higher overlap with the content of a film than press coverage of films does. This is partially due to the fact that social media users focus more on the topics of a production whereas the press pays strong attention to cinematographic and related features.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

IConference 2016 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89291

DOI

https://doi.org/10.9776/16305

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 is held by the authors. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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