I presented a paper this morning titled “Hail to the Chief: Comparative Presidential Face-ism on Online News Sites.” The abstract reads:
Past research demonstrated that visual displays demonstrated varying facial prominence, known as face-ism, among varying subjects with respect to race, gender and prominence. This paper compares the face-ism score of President Barack Obama on prominent news web sites in the early days of both of his terms. The analysis is timely and relevant as the nation’s first African-American president comes to power and constitutes one of the few studies on face-ism online. Results indicated that facial prominence of the president yielded a moderately low score on the face-ism scale which suggests that the editorial choices are reflective of stereotypical scores with respect to race rather than his powerful and prominent position.
Or words to that effect, anyway.
There are numbers in that paper, which is a great way to start a Saturday morning.
In the very next session The Yankee and I presented a paper we creatively titled “Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Virtual Watercooler? An Analysis of Election Night Conversations on Twitter.” We looked at hashtags and what was going on under #Election. She discussed the theory, I talked about more numbers and then read some of the interesting examples from our case study.
These things happened over the course of the evening’s election coverage. In more than 11,000 tweets with #election in that period between the polls closing and the end of the immediate coverage we found:
52 #GOP
47 #Republican
80 #Democrats
45 #Dems512 #Romney
1,095 #Obama
30 #Mitt
32 #Barack147 #CNN
47 #NBC
47 #Fox
30 #ABC
2 #CBS2,992 @ symbols (Conversations.)
205 RTs (Sharing others’ tweets.)
2,487 links (Sharing media.)
21,447 any # (Indexing attempt or punchline.)120 #Florida or traditional abbreviations
157 #Ohio, or OH
67 #Pennsylvania or traditional abbreviations
All of which is to say that, with the framework of social identity theory — your self-conception realized through your perceived membership in a relevant social group — we can see how formerly passive television viewers and newspaper readers are now not only taking active roles in conversation, but they are using primary identifiers to organize themes, which suggests a fair amount of implications for audience fragmentation, political activation and raises questions about “unofficial” hashtags, harnessing those results and forced versus voluntary interactivity.
Mostly, I enjoyed reading the tweets that we captured for the study. Here are a few I shared with the audience. These are direct quotes:
Dear Todd Akin, I do believe you suffered a legitimate defeat #inyoface #Election #legitimaterape
I feel like you should have to be 21 to vote. Some people just vote for the coolest name #YouDontKnowAnything #Election
The tone of PBS’s election coverage is basically Suck it Romney — Big Bird wins! Hilarious! #Election
Who at #NBC decided to put an #Election results map on the ice rink? Was Jack Donaghy involved in this?
This whole #Election tracker business turned our civil governance process into the highest stakes Fantasy Football game ever played.
I don’t tweet much.. But I hope @JohnKingCNN shuts up… You are so annoying.
Damn this girl on ABC is too fine! #Election
i used to have faith in my countrymen. now that i know my countrymen can be bought w/ phones and biRTh control, not so sure…#Election
Interesting dichotomy: Obama strong in swing states, Romney strong in states that snap their fingers out of time. #Election #Dems #GOP
Romney of Massachusetts might have won this. Romney of Tea Party, 47%, Ayn Rand, Benghazi blather, false Jeep ads… Not so much. #Election
Tuned into Fox News and was surprised to see that they harnessed the power of time travel and brought in Ben Franklin to cover the #Election
But #Romney holds firm in Cayman Islands and Switzerland. #Election
Obama 2012 campaign just announced it will unleash drones over Pakistan to celebrate re-election. #Election
i want to create a burlesque number called “the exit pole.” #Election
Another panelist talked about the making of this ad for Dale Peterson, former candidate for agriculture commissioner of Alabama.
That’s a real commercial. It was produced for the web because Peterson didn’t have TV money, but it was an instant hit online and the money started rolling in. Before long he went from five percent in the polls to pushing 30 percent. But he did not win in the Republican primary, despite his huge online following. The entire case study is an interesting exercise in aggressive, low budget politics.
So we go through all of the presentations and then the respondent, our old friend Dr. Larry Powell stands to discuss each of the presentations. He talks about how each of these studies are important and offered his suggestions for where the research should go.
For each paper he also offered his fake gift. One rhetorician received a copy of Ronald Reagan’s RNC acceptance speech, so that he might give it to Mitt Romney, for example. The author of the Dale Peterson work received a can of cashews.
Everyone in the room from Alabama is now all but rolling on the floor for, you see, Peterson has recently been arrested for shoplifting, twice. The second time he was dining on cashews.
For our paper Dr. Powell pointed out that The Yankee and I met in his class. That he served as advisor on both of our comps committees and now we are married.
“I think I’ve done enough.”
In the afternoon The Yankee was a member of a panel titled “Political Entertainment Television and the Framing of Choices and Consequences in the 2012 Presidential Campaign.”
Here she is now:
She talked about The Daily Show’s Indecision 2012 which was, I feel, the presentation that really brought the panel together.
So after that it was time for another very late lunch. We learned that three of the four sandwich shops within walking distance were closed. You’re in the middle of the downtown entertainment district on a Saturday and all the small places lock up at 3 p.m. Some business model. Back to Potbelly Sandwiches, then, and then back to the conference so that I might run the political communication division meeting. It is my penultimate responsibility as the division chair.
All went according to plan. Things moved along, I printed too many agendas, made a joke no one thought was funny and we conducted the business of the division. The Yankee was elected as the vice chair-elect of the division. That means she’ll program two divisions of presentations in a row, mass comm next year and political communication the year after that. That’s service to academia, for you.
Dinner was just about the strangest, most surrealistic, hysterical thing possible. Also we sang along to Carly Rae Jepsen. And I played the drums. There were drums at dinner and that was the part that made the most sense of all.
So how was your Saturday?
