Let's replay the political debate: Hypervideo technology for visual sensemaking of televised election debates

Abstract

• Hypervideo interactive visualisations improve sensemaking of televised political debates. • Visual analytics enhance sensemaking of large data and complex political debates. • Sensemaking tools improve people confidence in evaluating facts and evidence. • Sensemaking tools improve people active capability to re-assess and change assumptions. • Visual analytics narratives trigger questioning and changing of personal assumptions. Despite the widespread proliferation of social media in policy and politics, televised election debates are still a prominent form of large-scale public engagement between politicians and the electorate during election campaigns. Advanced visual interfaces can improve these important spaces of democratic engagement. In this paper, we present a user study in which a new hypervideo technology was compared with a publicly available interface for television replay. The results show that hypervideo navigation, coupled with interactive visualisations, improved sensemaking of televised political debates and promoted people's attitude to challenging personal assumptions. This finding suggests that hypervideo interfaces can play a substantial role in supporting citizens in the complex sensemaking process of informing their political choices during an election campaign, and can be used as instruments to promote critical thinking and political opinion shifting.