Deb8: A Tool for Collaborative Analysis of Video

Abstract

Public, parliamentary and television debates are commonplace in modern democracies. However, developing an understanding and communicating with others is often limited to passive viewing or, at best, textual discussion on social media. To address this, we present the design and implementation of Deb8, a tool that allows collaborative analysis of video-based TV debates. The tool provides a novel UI designed to enable and capture rich synchronous collaborative discussion of videos based on argumentation graphs that link quotes of the video, opinions, questions, and external evidence. Deb8 supports the creation of rich idea structures based on argumentation theory as well as collaborative tagging of the relevance, support and trustworthiness of the different elements. We evaluated the design of the tool in a study of three groups of three people. We present the results of the study and a reflection on the challenges involved.

What do we study when studying politics anddemocracy?A thematic analysis of how politics and democracy aretreated in SIGCHI conference papers

“…Papers in this category have been found to speak of "politically and ethically sensitive materials" (Durrant et al, 2014), "socio-political topology of the lived environment" (Gaver et al, 2016) or to state that online venues facilitate discussions on "topics ranging from political arguments to group coordination" (Zhang et al, 2017). Authors may justify their work by stating that "public, parliamentary and television debates are commonplace in modern democracies" but develop a tool for "synchronous collaborative discussion of videos based on argumentation graphs that link quotes of the video, opinions, questions, and external evidence (Carneiro et al, 2019)" -a contribution which is more distant from democracy than the initial sentence suggests. Scholars have improved "focus on socio-technical systems by taking seriously socio-political and socio-economic processes" (Lindtner et al, 2012) or highlighted that technological development is not "independent of social, political or economic forces" (Sun et al, 2015).…”

Truth in an Age of Information

“…There is of course long-standing work on argumentation systems, such as IBIS (Noble, 1988) and work in the NLP community to automatically analyse arguments. Much of this is targeted towards more professional audiences, but there are also steps to help the general public engage with media, such as the Deb8 system (Carneiro, 2019) developed at St Andrews, an accessible argumentation system that allows viewers of a speech or debate to collaboratively link assertions in the video to evidence from the web. This is an area which seems to have many opportunities for research and practical systems aimed at different audiences including the general public, journalists, politicians, academics, and fact checkers.…”

“…These are not easy problems and do not admit trite solutions. However, there is existing work that offers hope: tracking the provenance of press images (ICP, 2016), ways to expose the arguments in political debate (Carneiro, 2019), even using betting odds to track the influence of news on electoral opinion (Wall, 2017).…”

Collective action systems to mitigate disinformation

“…Researchers have focused on developing tools that leverage semi-automated approaches to tackle this issue. One of them is Deb8, a collaborative tool developed by Caneiro et al that supports users' discussion for fact-checking in videos [51]. Meanwhile, Sethi et al present an online social, collaborative argumentation system to verify alternative facts and misinformation by including users' emotional associations with those stances [265].…”

“…For this reason, research efforts have been devoted to designing collaborative systems to help fact-checkers and journalists address mis-and disinformation. For instance, collaborative tools for fact-checking news [265], videos [51] and visual disinformation [306,191]. Similar systems were also proposed to combat disinformation with crowdsourcing such as Newstrition [4], Checkdesk [1] and Truly Media [47].…”