Emerging Media Prof. Andrew Demirjian will be a Fellow in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT for 2018/2019. He is developing a new nonfiction media project applying computational text analysis and data visualization to a corpus of texts.
The project applies natural language processing techniques to interviews and archival documents to highlight linguistic patterns and connections between topics and speakers that may be elusive due to the vast quantities of material. With recent trends in documentary focusing on virtual worlds, Andrew’s research instead concentrates on the role of language in documentary film. In addition to Andrew’s creative text visualization project, an anticipated outcome of this research is a tool to aid media makers dealing with large volumes of language in archives or interview footage.