A framework for the unsupervised and semi-supervised analysis of visual frames

This article introduces to political science a framework to analyze the content of visual material through unsupervised and semi-supervised methods. It details the implementation of a tool from the computer vision field, the Bag of Visual Words, for the definition and extraction of "tokens" that allow researchers to build an Image-Visual Word matrix which emulates the Document-Term matrix in text analysis. This reduction technique is the basis for several tools familiar to social scientists, such as topic models, that permit exploratory, and semi-supervised analysis of images. The framework has gains in transparency, interpretability, and inclusion of domain knowledge with respect to other deep learning techniques. I illustrate the scope of the BoVW by conducting a novel visual structural topic model which focuses substantively on the identification of visual frames from the pictures of the migrant caravan from Central America.