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| Semester | fall semester 2023 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Clint Claessen (clint.claessen@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | Camera-shot distance, angles, facial expressions and gestures. These detailed markers of images matter in the political arena. Winning candidates look different from losing candidates (Bucy, 2016): appropriate nonverbal behavior, expressive variability, and nonverbal tics are all picked up by the audience, often unconsciously. At a time when advanced language models in political science emphasize the usefulness of textual information, visual communication remains a neglected area. ‘Human culture is a visual culture’ (Veneti et al., 2019: 1), however, and even though speech started to develop with the first humans, writing is only 4.000 years old (Bucy, 2009). And not only is factual text information much harder to recall than visual information, it also requires much more time to process. In this seminar, we will therefore look at the role of visual communication for political leaders, parliamentary candidates and politicized issues. We will delve deeper in political communication and social media theory, and devote most of our efforts to qualitative aspects of image analysis by setting up coding schemes, manually analyzing images and examining open-ended survey responses. In the last three sessions, we will shift our focus to quantitative aspects of visual analysis by obtaining data from social media and applying computational tools in Python in order to recognize and identify facial expressions. The goal is that you can use visual analysis in your own research on the basis of your newfound knowledge about the role of images in politics. |
| Learning objectives | At the end of the seminar: - The students can sketch the biological differences between textual and visual image processing. - They can set up coding schemes for political debates, speeches and visual frames. - They understand different theories of political communication and apply them to political campaigns. - They can perform basic statistical operations with image data in Python. |
| Bibliography | Bucy, E. P. (2016). The look of losing, then and now: Nixon, Obama, and nonverbal indicators of opportunity lost. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(14), 1772-1798. Cutler, J., & Dickenson, M. (2020). Computational Frameworks for Political and Social Research with Python. Springer International Publishing. Deen Freelon & Chris Wells (2020) Disinformation as Political Communication, Political Communication, 37:2, 145-156 Denton Jr, R. E., Trent, J. S., & Friedenberg, R. V. (2019). Political campaign communication: Principles and practices. Rowman & Littlefield. Grabe, M. & Bucy, E. (2009) Image Bite Politics. News and the Visual Framing of Elections. Oxford University Press. Masters, R. (1989). The Nature of Politics. Yale University Press. Veneti, A., Jackson, D. & Lilleker, Darren G. (2019) Visual Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan. Taigman, Y., Yang, M., Ranzato, M. A., & Wolf, L. (2014). Deepface: Closing the gap to human-level performance in face verification. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 1701-1708). |
| Comments | Attention: All Seminars will be graded in the Department of Political Science. Grading scale 6.0 to 1.0, whereupon 4.0 is a pass. The number of participants is limited. The places are assigned according to date of enrollment and subject of study. Priority will be given to students of Political Science. |
| Admission requirements | Attention: All Seminars will be graded in the Department of Political Science. Grading scale 6.0 to 1.0, whereupon 4.0 is a pass. The number of participants is limited. The places are assigned according to date of enrollment and subject of study. Priority will be given to students of Political Science. |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Wednesday | 14.15-15.45 | Bernoullistrasse 14/16, Kleiner Seminarraum 02.001 |
| Modules |
Modul: Regionaler Fokus B.A. (Bachelor's degree subject: Political Science) Modul: Vertiefung Politikwissenschaft B.A. (Bachelor's degree subject: Political Science) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment details | Active participation and bi-weekly assignments (600-800 words each) |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | 1-6 0,5 |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Politikwissenschaft |