On Thursday 23 May 2024, Gabriele Pinto, Post-Doc Research Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, will hold a lecture on “Data, Trends, and Biases of Television Political Talk Shows: Evidence from Italy”.
A B S T R A C T
Even though we live in the golden age of the Internet and social networks, the idiot box
remains the primary and undisputed source of political information. At the same time, the
production and consumption of videos are becoming ubiquitous (e.g. tik-tok and reels).
Currently, television and videos are seldom employed as primary data sources by social
scientists utilizing a quantitative approach. This is primarily attributed to the costs and
technical chalenges inherent in the data colection process, particularly when contrasted
with more accessible mediums such as text (e.g., “text-as-data”). In the last couple of years,
recent advances in machine learning tools for computer vision and audio analysis have
fina ly paved the way to the possibility of extracting meaningful data from large video
archives, at relatively little cost. We show how to apply these tools through a case study
involving a web-scraped colection spanning five years (2018-2023) of episodes from two
prominent Italian Political Talk Shows (Otto e Mezzo & Stasera Italia) that we match with
minute-by-minute TV viewership data from Auditeltm. We provide a descriptive analysis of
the trends we find in our case study concerning political representation, topics discussed,
and emotional behaviors.
The lecture is held in room 237 at 12.15 pm.
For information: pietro.battiston@unipi.it
