http://vote-for-the-appropriate.com/

Inspired by the American legal dramedy “Boston Legal – Kill, Baby, Kill”, recent use of social media in politics, and the Taiwanese Presidential Debate for the coming 2012 Taiwanese Presidential Election, as well as the Talking Head project by my close friend Joshua Dickinson, I decide to spend my final week of winter break on this project, and see where the experiment may lead to. I started this project on 12/28 and the voting started since 1/8 and will last for 7 days. This project was a study of how audiences may favor the politician regarding his/her speech style by voting. With minimal language manipulation, this is also an experiment to how visual images may contribute to the voting result. All images were rendered using the Talking Head Engine. The materials include presidential debate videos from 2011/12/03 and 2011/12/17. The clips were segmented from the last 75-second video from every debate section of the original videos. These sections include proposition, conclusion, and examination by 5 major news agencies as well as 12 civic groups.

The talking head engine “takes a video clip, stripes the audio, analyzes and intelligently segments this audio into small sections marking their point in time, and then gives each of these sections a rating in terms of frequency and amplitude. These segments are then sorted, usually from loudest to softest. The program then returns to the original video clip, grabbing “snapshots” at each of the loudest points, which it then combines into a single image, giving us a still portrait of a speaker at his most emphatic moments”.

For this website, user can vote based on the very first impression of those three speech visualization on frontpage. User can further rate each speaker’s speech style in the end of the post “Visualizing Speech Styles in 2012 Taiwanese Presidential Debate”. User can view voting results after voting or click on Top-rated tab to see rating results.

I’ve been interested in how technology influences media, and on a larger scale, human communication. The following photo was taken at the Newseum, DC Washington, USA, and it’s interesting to see how will the boundary be re-shaped by enabling technology in the near future.

The following are survey on the use of social media on 2012 Taiwan Presidential Election (1/14/2012), briefing on presidential candidates and participatory groups in the debate, as well as the tweet on Taiwan President Election with hashmark of major news agencies(Reuters, Xinhua, CNA, NHK, AFP, AP).

Survey on Use of Social Media in 2012 Taiwan President Election
- Ma Ying-jeou (KuoMinTang)
[Youtube: Yes]
[Twitter: Yes]
[Facebook: Yes]
[Plurk: Yes]
[Website: Yes]
[Google+: Yes]
[App: No]

- Tsai Ing-wen (Democratic Progressive Party)
[Youtube: Yes]
[Twitter: Yes]
[Facebook: Yes]
[Plurk: Yes]
[Website: Yes]
[Google+: Yes]
[App: Yes]

- James Soong Chu-yu (People First Party)
[Youtube: No]
[Twitter: No]
[Facebook: Yes]
[Plurk: No]
[Website: No(unofficial)]
[Google+: No]
[App: No]

Education briefing (sources: wikipedia)
- Ma Ying-jeou
[LL.B. National Taiwan University, 1972]
[LL.M. New York University Law School, 1976]
[S.J.D. Harvard Law School, 1981]

- Tsai Ing-wen
[College of Law, National Taiwan University, 1978]
[M.S. in Legal Science, Cornell University, 1980]
[PhD, London School of Economics, 1984]

- James Soong Chu-yu
[Bachelor Degree in Diplomacy, National Chengchi University, 1964]
[M.A. in Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1967]
[M.S. in Library Science, The Catholic University of America, 1971]
[PhD in Political Science, Georgetown University, 1974]

Presidential Debate
- 12/3/2011 1st presidential debate (president candidates)
- 12/10/2011 2nd presidential debate (vice-president candidates)
- 12/15/2011
- 12/17/2011 3rd presidential debate (president candidates)
- 12/23/2011 policy presentation
- 12/30/2011 policy presentation
- 1/4/2012 policy presentation
- 1/6/2012 policy presentation

5 News Agency in 1st and 3rd Presidential Debate QA Session
- Central News Agency
- United Daily News Group
- China Times
- Liberty Times
- Next Media

12 Civic Groups in 2nd Presidential Debate QA Session
- Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation
- Consumer’s Foundation, Chinese Taipei
- Taiwan Association for Human Right
- 248 Agriculture Market
- Taiwan Environmental Protection Union
- Judicial Reform Foundation
- Fairtax
- Awakening Foundation
- Taiwan Alliance for Advancement of Youth Right and Welfare
- National Teachers’ Association R.O.C.
- Taiwan Labor Front
- SocialHousingTW

Recent Social Media on Politics
- Internet Politics, 1994
- US Presidential Election, 2008 [Non-classical, Non-symmetrical]
- Egypt, 2011 [No Leader]

Reference (in alphabetic order)
- 2012 Taiwan Presidential Election on wikipedia [Chinese version, more detail][English version, concise]
- American dramedy Boston Legal (Kill, Baby, Kill)
- Appropriation Arts
- Map of world press freedom at Newseum, Washington DC, USA
- More on Taiwan Public Television Service Online
- Taiwan Public Television Service Online Youtube Channel for Presidential Debate
- “Talking Heads” by Joshua Dickinson
- Video materials from PTS Live Streaming Service
- William Safire