Tweetgeist: Can the Twitter Timeline Reveal the Structure of Broadcast Events?

We explore applications for enriching experiences around live visual media events by leveraging conversational activity on short messaging services. We investigate the application of existing methods to discover the structure and content of media events and develop methods for exposing the discovered informational cues to users. We demonstrate these approaches using video footage and Twitter activity during two broadly watched media events: the first 2008 USA Presidential Debate and the Inauguration of Barack Obama. For the debates, we demonstrate a method for segmenting and annotating the media via conversational activity for the purpose of watching the video after the event has already passed. For the inauguration, we demonstrate approaches for exposing an awareness of the current topics of discussion on Twitter and the apparent levels of interest via a real-time feedback display. The primary contribution of this CSCW Horizons note is an initial exploration of approaches for applying cues mined from community conversation towards enhanced experiences around multimedia events and an invitation for a discussion of further approaches for applying these techniques to a growing number of domains and applications.