Lehrblogger

Read the final revision of my second paper below, download the PDF, and/or read the original.

Update: Clay has posted a zip file of many of our papers in one of his guest posts on Boing Boing!

Supporting the Supporters in the 2012 Election: Video Media

The success of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign can be attributed to the enthusiastic efforts of a large number of supporters, many of whom created and distributed pro-Obama video media. These media are poised to play an increasingly important role in the future, and campaigns should adopt strategies for the 2012 election to more fully support the efforts of these supporters 1.

Hip-hop artist will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video has been viewed well over fifteen million times 2, the “Dear Mr. Obama” video by an Iraq War veteran has over thirteen million views 3, and Obama Girl’s first video has been viewed nearly twelve million times 4. These videos represent only the tip of the tip of an iceberg of user-generated content relating to the 2008 election. A small number of videos have reached this uppermost level of popularity, a larger number have been somewhat less popular, and a huge number have only hundreds or even dozens of views (a YouTube search for “obama” returns 784,000 results*5).

This ‘long tail’ of hundreds of thousands of non-viral videos might have had substantial and under-appreciated political import 6. In an article titled “It’s the Conversations Stupid! – The Link between Social Interaction and Political Choice,” Valdis Krebs observes that, “after controlling for personal attitudes and demographic membership, researchers found social networks, that voters are embedded in, exert powerful influences on their voting behavior” 7. Imagine the video creator who spends hours on a short video with a political agenda. That person certainly wants as many people as possible to see the video, so she will email it to all of her friends and ask that they email it to their friends. Critically, for the first few times it is forwarded, the video has an increased effect on the viewer because that viewer has a social connection to the person who created it and whose opinions it represents. The enhanced effects of these relatively unpopular videos can be aggregated over the huge number of them that constitute the long tail, and this aggregate results in electoral influence that a campaign can use to its advantage.

The explosion of video in this election occurred for two primary technological reasons: first, there are free online forums such as YouTube for the hosting, searching, and sharing of video media; and second, the computers used to make these videos have become easier to operate and less expensive to purchase. The digital landscape will change again before the 2012 election, and it would serve a campaign well to anticipate (and potentially direct) these changes to better support the user creation of media. Although many people did have the knowledge and tools necessary to produce political content for the recent election, many did not. A campaign can provide these tools, information about how to use them, primary source content that can enrich them, and a community to encourage their production.

Web-based applications that run in a browser window are becoming increasingly popular for common tasks such as email, calendar management, and document editing. Although often less powerful than their desktop counterparts, they have the significant advantage that users do not need to download or install any software. Jumpcut.com is a web application that offers free video hosting services (similar to YouTube’s) and free video editing tools (similar to that found in a basic desktop application such as Apple’s iMovie) 8. The startup was founded in 2005, launched a public beta in April 2006, and was bought by Yahoo that October 9. If a campaign licensed the use of this functionality from Yahoo or hired developers to recreate it, then it could empower all of its supporters with Internet access (either at home or at a public location) to create and distribute political videos. Although this would be unlikely to have an effect on the quantity or quality of the highly viral videos, it would stretch out the long tail so that even more supporters can create content and send it to trusting contacts.

In addition to providing these tools, the campaign could provide official instructional videos, help documents, and other information to teach supporters how to use them. This would further stretch the long tail to include nearly all supporters interested in creating content, regardless of hardware/software ownership or pre-existing technical skill.

The campaign can further facilitate the media creation process by providing easily accessible source content. Currently, supporters find clips on YouTube and then download, edit, and re-upload them as parts of their own videos. The campaign could provide original, high-quality versions of all candidate speeches, interviews and other appearances, thus saving supporters time that was previously spent searching through YouTube videos for quality source files. To further facilitate finding this content, the campaign could offer searching of not just videos but also the transcribed text of those videos. It is currently very difficult for a supporter to find an instance of a candidate discussing a particular issue if that person does not remember where or when the candidate spoke on the topic, and searchable transcripts would make supporters no longer limited to what they had previously seen.

Finally, the campaign can further strengthen its existing online social network by focusing activity around this process of video creation. Online forums and chat rooms would enable supporters to discuss their videos, share tips, answer questions, and provide feedback that would refocus content to be maximally effective. In addition, it might encourage users to reframe videos that had been intended only to be humorous or to market their creators (such as Taryn Southern’s “Hott 4 Hill[ary]” Obama-Girl copycat videos 10) so that they made a stronger political statement. The campaign could also attempt to replicate some of Flickr’s success with groups focused around particular types of image creation by supporting groups focused on a particular video technique. Just as Flickr has groups for those interested in high dynamic range photography, groups could be created on the campaign’s website for those interested in making videos that used a green screen to combine clips (as in the Obama Girl videos).

Furthermore, the situating of supporters’ video editing activities within the context of the campaign’s website allows the campaign some degree of message direction. Decisions about page design, the wording of instructions, and the choice of example videos can all set the tone that the supporters will be working within when making their own videos. In addition, an active community might have a moderating influence on the content of the videos so that damaging outliers (such as the pro-Obama “Sing for Change” video that was repurposed by Republicans 11) might be toned down before going public.

Note that the campaign would still be able to avoid direct involvement with the video creation process and therefore abdicate responsibility for problematic content. The campaign should also be careful not to give supporters the impression that creation of media is a sufficient substitute for other forms of involvement such as canvassing or phone banking. Instead, the campaign should highlight videos that demonstrated that their creators were volunteering in additional ways. Supporters who contribute to the campaign often consider themselves to have made an investment in it, and thus it is to their advantage to further help that campaign to succeed because they want a return on that investment. The campaign should design the opportunities for supporter involvement to be mutually complimentary, encouraging supporters to become actively involved in multiple ways.

In conclusion, a 2012 presidential campaign should take advantage of existing frameworks and upcoming technologies to support its supporters in producing political video media. The campaign should embrace the aggregate electoral importance of the long tail of supporter created videos. Specifically, campaigns should offer free online video editing and hosting services so that as many supporters as possible can make a contribution. The campaign should also provide supporters with information about how to use these video creation tools, the source content necessary to make their arguments, and a social community in which to discuss their creations. Supporters would feel more invested in getting their candidate elected to office, thus strengthening the campaign on multiple levels in a variety of social networks.

*YouTube limits search functionality to provide a limited number of results per query, and this complicates gathering more detailed information for less popular videos.

1. “Support the supporters” phrase from unpublished articles and lectures by Clay Shirky
2. “Yes We Can” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY
3. “Dear Mr. Obama” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8
4. “I Got a Crush…On Obama” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU
5. Youtube search for ‘obama’ – http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=obama
6. The Long Tail on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
7. Valdis Krebs – http://www.extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Nine-Krebs.pdf
8. Jumpcut.com – http://jumpcut.com/
9. Jumpcut.com on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpcut.com
10. “Hott 4 Hill – She’s Hott For Hillary!!” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sudw4ghVe8
11. “Sing for Change Obama” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb8ntODQha4

project page with previous posts here

I resolved a couple of bugs in the line drawing animation, and now my database calls are made for each tree before it attempts to start drawing lines (allowing for a smoother animation). I also got the built-in View state iterator to work and make the globe rotate. Although much needs to be done before the project is ready to present, i think I’ve found solutions to the major challenges. A video is below:

TwiTerra Milestone from me on Vimeo.

I am hoping to do a number of things before presenting it in class next week, but for now I need to spend a few days working on my AJAX keyboard portfolio project. This list includes:

• the spinning of the globe should follow the animation of the tweet lines, rather than spin continuously (this should eliminate the unwanted pause between rotations)
• the lines between tweet coordinates are not interpolating correctly due to the way that latitude and longitude correspond to globe positions – this just needs a little bit of math to fix
• I need to show the text of the tweet, either as an Annotation object on the globe or somewhere else
• I want to filter so that I am showing the most interesting trees, based on tree complexity, the distance between tweets and the locations of the tweets

project page with previous posts here

I rewrote my Scala code from the Midterm to access a MySQL database for its tweet data instead of the Twitter search API’s XML feeds. I used Lift, the Scala web framework, to access the database – this tutorial and this one were helpful, but I would not have been able to get it working without Jorge Ortiz’s help. (Thanks!)

The current version is relatively rudimentary, and simply iterates through each of the root tweets in the database (those without a parent) and displays them. It uses the parent_id fields of the children to recursively build trees for each root, and then draws the lines corresponding to the locations of the tweets in that tree on the globe. I have functionality for filtering these trees by the minimum distance between tweets, but later I want to improve it to show only the most interesting/compelling tweets. I also need to figure out how to animate the globe to show the tweets in a smooth and appealing way.

The submission deadline for the ITP Winter Show is Monday December 1st, and I have re-posted the text of my submission over on TwiTerra’s project page – I’ll be likely be updating it as the show approaches.

previously: project proposal, midterm progress, initial idea, Twitter/Scala experiments

I’ve made substantial progress on my Twitter/globe project for ICM. I rewrote and improved the Twitter search code that fetched new retweets in PHP to work with a MySQL database on my Dreamhost web server. For each retweet found by that PHP script, it uses the @username syntax and text of the retweet to find the original retweet. If another retweet is found (i.e. there is a chain of retweets) it recurses back until it finds the original. If all of the tweets in the chain have valid location data, it stores each tweet with a unique ID (assigned by Twitter), the author’s username, the text of the tweet, the latitude/longitude, and the time.

It also stores the number of retweets that a tweet has – in a three tweet chain, the original tweet will have 2 retweets, the first of the two retweets will have 1 retweet, and the final retweet will have 0 retweets. It also stores the ID of the tweet’s parent tweet – in that same example, the original tweet will have no parent, the first retweet will have the ID of the original as its parent, and the second retweet will have the ID of the first retweet as its parent. This data will make it relatively simply to choose and display chains and trees of retweets on the globe by filtering for interesting structures and long distances between tweets.

You can see that PHP script here (sorry for the lack of comments, I’ll add them later), and it’s been running a few times an hour for the past several days. I have over 10,000 tweets in my database; about 5,500 of them are leaf nodes and have no retweets, 4,400 of them have one retweet, 500 have two retweets, 100 have three retweets, 30 have four retweets, and 25 have five or more retweets. I’m getting good data and will be able to draw interesting chains and trees on the globe, especially after it has been running for a few weeks.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to watch the sort of things that people are retweeting. For example, there was a flood of heavily retweeted content after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The three most heavily-retweeted tweets are (with 11, 14 and 11 retweets, respectively):

• chrisbrogan: 15 year old girl needs a kidney. She’s dying. Can you help? Can you at least retweet? http://tinyurl.com/6bue7f
• SantaClaus25: Please re-tweet and make history “Ho Ho Ho @Santaclaus25 and all of us here at the North Pole wish your family a Happy Thanksgiving”
• zigzackly: #mumbai sortable list of injured/dead at http://tinyurl.com/5q23h6 – please retweet

In addition, I’ve finalized the name (formerly Retweet Tree) to TwiTerra. I registered the twiterra.com domain, and for now it currently redirects to a WordPress page for the project. A project description and one-line pitch are coming soon, since the submission deadline to be in the show is December 1st.

The assignment was as follows:

Please write a 1500-2500 word doc on non-professional political media, outlining what strategic advice you would give a Presidential contender running in 2012 (which is to say, forming an exploratory committee in 2010.)

Topics can include, but do not need to be limited to: how to reach out to media producers, how to solicit research on your opponent, how to frame or benefit from media in favor of your candidate, how to frame or benefit from media against your opponent, how to neutralize media praising your opponent or attacking you, the difference between media produced in the primary vs. general campaign, and so on.

(PDF)