Files and links (1)
Preprint (Author's original)arXiv.org - Non-exclusive license to distribute, Open
Preprint
Beyond the Lens: Quantifying the Impact of Scientific Documentaries through Amazon Reviews
12 Feb 2025
Abstract
Engaging the public with science is critical for a well-informed population.
A popular method of scientific communication is documentaries. Once released,
it can be difficult to assess the impact of such works on a large scale, due to
the overhead required for in-depth audience feedback studies. In what follows,
we overview our complementary approach to qualitative studies through
quantitative impact and sentiment analysis of Amazon reviews for several
scientific documentaries. In addition to developing a novel impact category
taxonomy for this analysis, we release a dataset containing 1296
human-annotated sentences from 1043 Amazon reviews for six movies created in
whole or part by a team of visualization designers who focus on cinematic
presentations of scientific data. Using this data, we train and evaluate
several machine learning and large language models, discussing their
effectiveness and possible generalizability for documentaries beyond those
focused on for this work. Themes are also extracted from our annotated dataset
which, along with our large language model analysis, demonstrate a measure of
the ability of scientific documentaries to engage with the public.
Metrics
6 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Beyond the Lens: Quantifying the Impact of Scientific Documentaries through Amazon Reviews
- Creators
- Jill NaimanAria PessianzadehHanyu ZhaoA J ChristensenAlistair NunnShriya SrikanthAnushka GamiEmma MaxwellLouisa ZhangSri Nithya YeragorlaRezvaneh Rezapour
- Resource Type
- Preprint
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science
- Other Identifier
- 991022028049704721