Project Description
The overall goal with this project was to propose a solution for measuring impact of social justice documentaries in a theoretically grounded, systematic, empirical, scalable and rigorous fashion using computational approaches and to gain novel substantive knowledge providing actionable insights for film makers and funders.
The project has been conducted for the 2012~2016 period and all intended actions and goals have been achieved and made publicly available in the form of innovative software (ConText), software training material and education for students, scholars, and practitioners, and publications in premiere journals and conferences that document our improved and new methodological steps as well as any substantive knowledge gained by applying these novel methods. Especially, the proposed framework and technologies of impact measurement have been tested against and applied to real world media products. The project has made meaningful progress on developing and evaluating new, empirical, and scalable ways for measuring the impact of information products, especially issue-focused media, on individuals, groups, and society.

Publication

• Rezapour, R., & Diesner, J. (2017). Classification and detection of micro-level impact of issue-focused films based on reviews. Proceedings of 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), (pp. 1419-1431), Portland, OR. doi: 10.1145/2998181.2998201
• Diesner, J., Rezapour, R., & Jiang, M. (2016). Assessing public awareness of social justice documentary films based on news coverage versus social media. iConference. Philadelphia, USA. doi: 10.9776/16305
• Jiang, M., & Diesner, J. (2016). Says Who...? Identification of critic versus layman reviews of documentary films. Proceedings of 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), (pp. 2122-2132), Osaka, Japan.
• Jiang, M., & Diesner, J. (2016). Issue-focused documentaries versus other films: rating and type prediction based on user-authored reviews. Proceedings of ACM Hypertext and Social Media, (pp. 225- 230), Halifax, Canada. doi: 10.1145/2914586.2914638
• Diesner, J., & Rezapour, R. (2015). Social computing for impact assessment of social change projects. In International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction (SBP 2015). Washington, DC. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-16268-3_4
• Diesner, J., Kim, J., & Pak, S. (2014). Computational impact assessment of social justice documentaries. Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), special issue Metrics for Measuring Publishing Value: Alternative and Otherwise, 17(3). (invited paper). doi: 10.3998/3336451.0017.306
• Diesner, J., Pak, S., Kim, J., Soltani, K., & Aleyasen, A. (2014). Computational assessment of the impact of social justice documentaries. iConference, Berlin, Germany. doi: 10.9776/14125
• Diesner, J., Kim, J., & Higgings, A. (2014). Socio-semantic network analysis for impact assessment. Abstract European Social Networks Conference (EUSN), Barcelona, Spain.
• Diesner, J., Aleyasen, A., Kim, J., Mishra, S., & Soltani, S. (2013). Using socio-semantic network analysis for assessing the impact of documentaries. Extended abstract WIN (Workshop on Information in Networks), New York, NY.
• Diesner, J. (2014). ConText: Software for the integrated analysis of text data and network data. Preconference Social and Semantic Networks in Communication Research, Conference of International Communication Association (ICA), Seattle, WA.
• Diesner, J., Kim, J., Pak, S. (2014). Socio-Semantic Network Analysis for Impact Assessment of Documentaries. Presentations at International Network for Social Network Analysis. St. Pete Beach, FL.

Developed technology

• ConText: A solultion to support text and network analysis

Funder and grants
FORD Foundation:

• #0155-0370: Computational impact assessment of issue focused media and information products, 2015-2016
• #0145-0558: Computational impact assessment of social justice documentaries and media, 2014-2015
• #0125-6162: Computational impact assessment of social justice documentaries, 2012-2014