Until we have a critical mass of participants here, it is perhaps premature to make too many suggestions yet. But on the other hand, when other interested people do arrive they may appreciate having a variety of ideas and questions to contribute to. My understanding is that our interests are in how candidates and citizens will use YouTube in the presidential election and in trying to somehow capture not just the artifacts (links to the videos) but something else. That "something else" is something about relationships among the videos. I keep thinking in terms of two-dimentional maps of nodes and relationships, as in TheBrain software. There is no "WikiBrain" available online yet. http://www.thebrain.com/
The question i am trying to ask is how will we structure our "data," assuming the data are the URL's to the YouTube videos. Is what we are up to the use of social networking software like UCINET to map relationships among the videos? Is the relationship we are interested in that of response? If so, i suppose most of the citizen videos will be responses to the candidate's videos. Maybe our focus should be on the patterns of thought and "dialog" rather than upon patterns among the videos themselves. Perhaps we need a two-layer architecture in which we have a network in which the nodes are videos on level A, and the nodes are thoughts on level B. Now we (could) have links both within levels and between levels. I may be running too far ahead here. But time is short. I think we need a plan and we need tools to organize data and for data visualization. Perhaps we need to identify specific areas of expertise (such as modeling using UCINET and modeling using TheBrain) and recruit individuals with those skills. We don't have a lot of time for this to evolve "naturally."
Bruce Neubauer
Comments (3)
Bob Boynton said
at 10:34 am on Jun 22, 2008
"If so, I suppose most of the citien videos will be responses to the candidate's videos."
It may be the case that most citizen videos are a response to a campaign video, but that certainly was not the case for the Ron Paul videos. His followers were very busy constructing a Ron Paul campaign for him. Then there are things like Obama Girl or McCain girl that are, in some way or other, independent of the campaign. I think we do not know what any of the potential distributions are like. No one has done this before. So figuring out what are distributions worth investigating and which not seems to be where we are.
Bruce Neubauer said
at 11:14 am on Jun 22, 2008
"So figuring out what are distributions worth investigating and which not seems to be where we are."
Is there a difference in meaning between a video and a distribution? Are we seeking to measure worth in terms of a contribution to civil dialog or worth in terms of advancing a particular candidate's chances of election?
I suppose one measure of worth (however defined) is the number of viewings within two weeks.
Another metric may be something about its place in the network in terms of its value in promoting "dialog." It seems to me that there are two major reasons why someone would produce a "child" video of a particular parent. One is to support the theme of the parent. The other reason is to "answer" or challenge the theme of parent video. If we have software that allows us to apply filters and to visualize patterns of relationships among videos, perhaps we can somehow measure the worth of a video in terms of its contribution to dialog by its position in the network with certain filters set.
This URL suggests how we might approach this, using videos as the nodes (on level A if we have multiple levels of architecture).
http://www.durlandconsulting.com/images/pdfs/Understanding_maps_11_03a.pdf
It seems to me that Cutpoints and very central nodes are most important, but without being able to filter by meaning, our metrics of worth may be confusing. Isolates are videos that have no obvious "parent" and that apparently do not inspire other new videos. They are likely to have low numbers of viewings.
Bob Boynton said
at 10:41 am on Jun 23, 2008
I just put a word 'cloud' on Whats in a Name. It is the names of the Biden campaign ads -- name and url being more or less the same. It is a bit of evidence about what you can get from file names. The candidate's name 'stands out.' So the image has to be rather large if you want to read much of anything else.
There is probably a more felicitous way to link to that page, but here is the url.
http://youtube08election.pbwiki.com/Whats-in-a-name
The word cloud program is a new toy. I promise not to impose it on you many more time.
You don't have permission to comment on this page.