1. Computational Impact Assessment of Social Justice Documentaries Jana Diesner, Jinseok Kim, Shubhanshu Mishra, Kiumars Soltani, Sean Wilner, Amirhossein Aleyasen The iSchool, Department of Computer Science, Illinois Informatics Institute 1

2. Problem Statement: Measuring Impact Goal of (social justice) documentaries: Storytelling – Create memories, imagination, sharing Goal of funders and producers: Impact – Evoke change in people’s knowledge and/or behavior Common approach/ status quo: – Big data (frequency counts) vs. thick data (interviews) – Science: psychological effects of media on individuals – Need: computational, empirical, scalable, rigorous, theory Q: How can we know if a documentary has what impact? – Generalized: measure impact of information in terms of change Q: How early in a film’s life cycle can we answer this question? – Prediction models for likely impact trajectories Here and now usefulness for producers – Strategic allocation of limited resources – Leverage existing social capital 2

3. Approach: A story of microscopes and telescopes Assumption: documentaries produced, screened, watched as part of larger, dynamic ecosystems of stakeholders and information flow Method: identify, map, monitor, analyze social (stakeholders) and semantic (information) networks to study their structure, functioning and dynamics 3

4. Diesner J, Pak S, Kim J, Soltani K, Aleyasen A (2014) Computational Assessment of the Impact of Social Justice Documentaries. iConference, Berlin, Gemany This is no computational fishing expedition. We have theory: CoMTI Framework 4

5. Scientific Logic Baseline Ground truth Content Reality/ Change Meta Data Content Social Structure Meta Data Content Social Structure Meta Data Content Social Structure Movie Theme Transcript 5 Technology: ConText http://context.lis.illinois.edu

6. 6 Lessons Learned

7. Thank you! Acknowledgement: This work is supported by the FORD Foundation, grant 0125-6162. We are also grateful to feedback and advice from Dr. Susie Pak from St. John’s University, Orlando Bagwell, former director of JustFilms at the Ford Foundation, and Joaquin Alvarado from the Center for Investigative Reporting. For questions, comments, feedback, follow-up: Jana Diesner Email: jdiesner@illinois.edu Phone: (412) 519 7576 Web: http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdiesnerjdiesner@illinois.eduhttp://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdiesner 7