Visualising the UK General Election 2015 TV Debates

在2010年大选期间，英国首次举行了电视转播的领导人辩论。支持这些电视活动的一个关键论点是，与通常的政治相关内容相比，它们可以接触到更广泛的受众，而且，在观看这些节目后，通常不关心政治的辩论观察员可能会对选举问题有更好的了解；更有可能与朋友和家人讨论政策；而且比那些没有接触过辩论的人更有可能投票。简而言之，电视选举辩论具有启发式功能，为选民提供资源，使他们能够履行代议制民主中知情和反思的公民的规范角色。科尔曼等人在2010年英国大选辩论后进行的研究（“客厅里的领导人——2010年首相辩论”，牛津：路透社研究所，2011年）表明，公众对这种了解候选人及其政策的方式有很大的兴趣，但许多观众对他们所目睹的事情的意义感到不确定。这促使一群来自不同学科的学者——信息科学、政治传播和设计——聚在一起，探讨如何使未来电视上领导人的辩论更容易被具有特定信息需求的观众群体所理解。在考虑向公民提出复杂论点的最佳方法，以便就政治问题产生更明智的公众辩论时，我们转向了计算机支持论证可视化（CSAV）领域，该领域在利用创新信息技术提出复杂论点方面有着良好的记录，公民可以在政策审议过程中理解和反思。我们在这项研究中的目标是开发一个基于web的开源平台，该平台包含一套可视化工具，并开发一个工作模型，说明该平台如何嵌入混合媒体生态中，以覆盖和响应公共政治辩论的问题。该平台的设计将着眼于i)回应受众和特定类型受众成员的信息需求；Ii)以考虑信息寻求者的审美和符号需求的方式呈现话语内容；iii)不仅通过采用创新的CSAV方法将辩论者的论点可视化，而且还通过使用非CSAV特定技术将辩论的其他特征可视化，例如词云可视化(在辩论中使用的关键词和短语被提取并可视化，例如图形特征，如字体大小，颜色，定位用于描述最重要的单词和短语)和时间序列分析（重点是可视化辩论中各种言语行为的时间顺序，以便捕捉关键修辞事件的“及时”上下文）。

During the 2010 general election the first ever televised leaders' debates to be held in the United Kingdom took place. A key argument in favour of these televised events was that they could reach a wider audience than is usual for politically-related content and that, after watching them, normally apolitical debate-watchers might be better informed about election issues; more likely to discuss policies with their friends and families; and more likely to vote than those who are not exposed to the debates. In short, televised election debates perform a heuristic function, providing voters with resources that enable them to carry out their normative role as informed and reflective citizens of a representative democracy. Research conducted by Coleman et al ("Leaders in the Living Room--The Prime Ministerial Debates of 2010", Oxford: Reuters Institute, 2011) after the 2010 UK debates showed that there was a significant public appetite for this means of learning about the candidates and their policies, but that many viewers were left feeling uncertain about the meaning of what they had witnessed. This prompted a group of scholars from different disciplines - information science, political communication and design - to get together with a view to exploring how future televised leaders' debates might be made more comprehensible to groups of viewers with specific information needs.In considering the best approach to presenting complex arguments to citizens with a view to generating better informed public debate about political issues, we have turned to the field of Computer-Supported Argumentation Visualisation (CSAV) which has a track record of utilising innovative information techniques to present complex arguments that citizens can make sense of and reflect upon in the course of policy deliberations.Our aim in this research is to develop an open-source web-based platform that incorporates a suite of visualisation tools and to develop a working model of how this platform can be embedded within a mixed-media ecology for covering and responding to issues of public political debate. The platform will be designed with a view to i) responding to the information needs of audiences and specific types of audience member; ii) presenting the discursive content in ways that take account of the aesthetic and symbolic needs of information seekers; and iii) not only visualising the debaters' arguments by adopting innovative CSAV methods, but also visualising other features of the debates through the use of non-CSAV-specific techniques, such as word-cloud visualisations (where key words and phrases used in a debate are extracted and visualised such that graphical features like font-size, colour, and positioning are used to depict most import words and phrases) and time-series analyses (where the emphasis is on visualising the chronology of the various speech acts during the debate, so that the context "in time" of key rhetorical events can be captured).