A full paper for poster-presentation to the ICCC2009 (International Conference on Convergence Content) held on December 17~19, 2009, in Hanoi University of Culture, Vietnam. http://www.koreacontents.or.kr   http://iccc2009.itshome.co.kr

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Online Image Content Analysis of Political Figures: Fa-cial Expressions of National Assembly Members in

South Korea

Bulent Ozel*, Han Woo PARK***Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey,

** YeungNam University, Korea

E-mail: hanpark@ynu.ac.kr

Research Question

Do facial images displayed on official homepages of politicians differ based on politicians’

socio-political-demographic attributes?How?

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

• Web as an interactive political arena with vis-ually rich and enhanceable content(Angus et.al., 2011)

• Demonstration of sentimentality analysis based on facial pictures of South Korean politicians.

• Demonstration of feasibility and validity of anal-ysis on facial expression supported by large number of images retrieved from politicians' homepages.

Motivation

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

• 1879 images extracted from front pages of official homepages

Data

Primary data were collected from official homepages of 18th National Assembly mem-bers(elected in 2008) in South Korea.

Covering 277 out of 292 members(as of 13 August 2009)

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Categories(Coleman & Wasike, 2007; Verser & Wicks, 2000):

– Smiling– Frowning– No expression– Given that this is

an exploratory re-search, one coder was employed

:

Variables:– Gender,– Age,– Party Affiliation,– Hometown,– Experience,– Constituency,– Web visibility– Website size

Methodology

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Types Content

Smiling face Turning up the corners of the mouth, usually showing

their teeth; an upward curving of the corners of the

mouth, revealing pleasure, happiness, or amusement; a

downward curving of the corners of the eyes, expressing

moderate joy.

Frowning face Wrinkling of the brow, showing displeasure, anger, un-

rest, disapproval, and tiredness; a downward curving of

the corners of the mouth; staring at something with

anger, discontent, or unkindness.

No-expression No movement around mouth, eyes, or brow, revealing

no emotional information.

Online Image content analysis of Web 2.0 politics

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Politicians’ facial expressions were categorized in one of following three groups:

No-expression Smiling Frowning

Conclusions(1)

• A smiling image is the most prevalent facial expression on Web pages of South Korean politicians regardless of distribution of their socio-political-demographic attributes.

Types Frowning No-expression Smiling Sum

Frequency

(Percent)

154

(8.20)

471

(25.07)

1,254

(66.74)

1,879

(100.00)

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Conclusions(2)

• Existence and strength of a smiling image has statistically significant positive correla-tion with politicians' visibility counts.

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Conclusions(3)

• Opposition parties significantly exhibit more prevalent frowning faces and ex-pressionless faces compared to ruling party.

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Conclusions(4)

• More experienced politicians, contrary to their less experienced colleagues with similar ages, keep smiling!

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

Limitations & Future Work

• Use of multiple coders• Including all of the facial images posted to politi-

cian homepages• A longitudinal analysis: What facial expressions

did oppositional politicians make when they were in power?

• Conducting an international comparison• Analyzing the facial images retrieved from portal,

search engines, social networking sites, etc.

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Thank you!Q & A

Han Woo PARK, Ph.D.(Corresponding author)Associate ProfessorDepartment of Media and Information, Ye-ungNam University, KoreaDirector of WCU (World Class University) Webometrics Institutehanpark@ynu.ac.kr http://www.hanpark.net http://english-webometrics.yu.ac.kr

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

References• E. Angus, D. Stuart, and M. Thelwall, “Flickr’s potential as an

academic image resource: an exploratory study”, Journal of Li-brarianship & Information Science, 2011 (in press).

• R. Coleman and B. Wasike, ``Visual Elements in Public Jour-nalism Newspapers in an Election: A Content Analysis of the Photographs and Graphics in Campaign 2000'', Journal of Communication, September, 54, 2004.

• R. Verser and R.H. Wicks, ``Managing Voter Impressions: The Use of Images on Presidential Candidate Web Sites during the 2000 Campaign'', Journal of Communication, 56, pp. 178-97.

WWIWCUWEBOMETRICSINSTITUTEINVESTIGATING INTERNET-BASED POLITIC WITH E-RESEARCH TOOLS

<Acknowledgement>

• Research for this paper has been supported by theWorld Class University(WCU) program through the National Research Foundation of Korea, which is funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (No. 515-82-06574, http://english-webometrics.yu.ac.kr). This pa-per is part of the Investigating Internet-based Politics us-ing e-Research Tools Project. The authors wish to thank Byung-Gyu Park, Yon-Soo Lim, Chien-Leng Hsu, and Maurice Vergeer for their suggestion and assistance

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