Hello my name is Emily Porter.
I'm a PhD student at the University of Washington.
I'm here today to discuss research performed
with my co-authors, Dr. Kraft and Dr. Keegan
on our work, Visual Narratives and Collective Memory
across Peer-Produced Accounts of Contested Sociopolitical
events.
Since time is limited, I'm only going
to cover this work at a very high level.
Culturally shared recollections or collected memories
play a significant role in shaping
the perception and interpretation
of current events.
Images are powerful tools in this process.
They document important events, communicate complex messages,
and symbolize shared values.
Culture influences the way that we perceive and assign
meaning to imagery, and in turn imagery also
influences culture by shaping political outcomes
and social events.
As more people engage in online discourse and citizen
journalism, it's become clear images of political crises
often elicit strong and divergent reactions
about how well they represent the grievances actors
and consequences of major turning points in a country's
political history.
Wikipedia provides a unique environment
to examine the differences in rhetoric
across controversial historic and culturally ingrained
political events because it requires
the consolidation of these events
into a single authoritative narrative for each language
edition.
Broadly, this framing led us to hypothesize
that those that experience a particular coup
or who share collective memories about that event
would document that event differently
than those that did not.
We analyzed 761 images across 1,164 articles about cruise
data in 97 language editions and created a tripartite network
composed of languages, images, and articles.
Examining image sharing behaviors,
we identified three different structural patterns
within the network that characterized typical image
usage across languages.
In order to better understand the variation captured
in these images, we created a 46-item typology
to classify these items and images,
and cluster them into themes.
This was followed by two case studies examining
the themes and image framing.
And finally, conducted full quantitative analysis,
clustering image themes by language usage at the article
level.
Taken together, these analysis have
led to the development of a novel method
for detecting divergent perspectives
of culturally tethered events through imagery.
As I mentioned previously, we identified
three different structural patterns
within the image sharing network that
characterized typical image usage across languages.
The first structure is the bloom where a single central image
is used across multiple articles and multiple languages,
suggesting that this image may distinctively
capture an event to the exclusion of any other images.
Clusters are characterized by several images being
used across multiple articles in the same subset of languages.
And finally, the monoculture in brown, captures images
used exclusively by a single language
across multiple articles demonstrating
the salience of these images within this language edition
as well as blind spots in other languages' coverage.
The image on the left was used widely across multiple language
editions, while the image on the right
appears predominantly in Slavic language editions.
Looking at the languages clustered by image codes,
we see four large clusters of the 44
languages with an article about this event, 35
occur in cluster 0.
Their co-occurrence in this cluster
reflect the bloom pattern discussed
on the previous slide, where identical images or images
with similar themes are used.
The single member of cluster 1 is Russian.
This outlier is an example of a monoculture using
unique types of imagery to document
Russian history distinctive from other languages
historical accounts.
Coups are typically domestically situated political events
embedded in cultural identity.
Languages tend to cluster themselves into camps.
Because culture and collective memory are tightly intertwined,
we would expect that those that experienced
a catastrophic sociopolitical event, such as a coup,
to assign meaning to imagery about that event
differently than those who did not take part
in that cultural experience.
And indeed we do.
Inside our languages, those that are more closely tied
to the history, cultures, and states
where these events occurred, tended
to display visual narratives closely aligned
with one another.
These narratives appeared at odds with
and distinct from outsider languages, those
which had few or weak historical cultural or geographical ties
to an event.
Our findings suggest that these patterns
may be a useful indication of divergent narratives
and framings of an event.
These analysis form a novel methodological framework
for uncovering culturally divergent perspectives
of political crises through imagery on Wikipedia.