Event

A framework for the unsupervised and semi-supervised analysis of visual frames

Date
5 Jun 2023
Time
14:00 UK time
Speakers
Michelle Torres (Rice)
Where
Manor Road Building, Seminar Room A, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Audience
Members of the University only
Booking
Not required
This article introduces to political science a framework to analyze the content of political visual material through unsupervised and semi-supervised methods. It details the implementation of a tool from the computer vision field, the Bag of Visual Words, for the definition and extraction of ``tokens'' that allow researchers to build an Image-Visual Word matrix which emulates the Document-Term matrix in text analysis. This reduction technique is the basis for several tools familiar to social scientists, such as topic models, that permit exploratory, and semi-supervised analysis of images. The framework has gains in transparency, interpretability, and inclusion of domain knowledge with respect to other deep learning techniques. I illustrate the scope of the BoVW by conducting a novel visual structural topic model which focuses substantively on the identification of visual frames from the pictures of the migrant caravan from Central America.