OCTOBER MEETING: Tuesday, Oct 31, 2023 at 5:20pm (US Central)

LOCATION: In person, Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level, Evanston
Online via Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/99826882859

DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly talks on data science techniques or applications, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Aspiring, beginning, and advanced data scientists are welcome!

AGENDA:

5:20pm - Meet and Greet
5:30pm - Talk by Yingdan Lu, Assistant Professor at the School of Communication, Northwestern University "Understanding the Evolution of Digital Propaganda Through Video-as-Data Methods"
6:20pm - Q&A

ABSTRACT:

Understanding the Evolution of Digital Propaganda Through Video-as-Data Methods
The increasing accessibility of digital video data and the proliferation of video-based social media have motivated scholars to develop new methods for analyzing large-scale videos in order to examine important communication concepts. Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have provided researchers with powerful tools for scalable video analysis. This talk showcases the video-as-data approach and presents two studies aimed at comprehending the evolution of propaganda in the digital media era. The first study unravels two different tactics designed to maximize attention by employing a multimodal approach that combines video, text, and metadata to examine a novel dataset of Douyin trending videos. The second study further theorizes how the Chinese government has adopted a decentralized propaganda model to compete for attention, drawing insights from the analysis of over five million Douyin videos. Both studies contribute to our understanding of how digital media and technologies have reshaped information control and show how social media videos can be analyzed computationally to shed light on political processes and outcomes.

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