Computational Assessment of the Impact of Social Justice Documentaries

Abstract

Documentaries are meant to tell a story, that is, to create memory, imagination and sharing (Rose, 2012). Moreover, documentaries aim to lead to change in people's knowledge and/ or behavior (Barrett & Leddy, 2008). How can we know if a documentary has achieved these goals? We report on a research project where we have been developing, applying and evaluating a theoretically-grounded, empirical and computational solution for assessing the impact of social justice documentaries in a scalable, robust and rigorous fashion. We leverage cutting-edge methods from socio-technical data analytics - namely natural language processing and network analysis - for this purpose and provide a publicly available technology (ConText) that supports these routines. In this paper, we focus on the theoretical foundations of this project, address our methodological and technical framework, and provide an illustrative example of the introduced solution.

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