Berkan Balci


2025

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Podcast Outcasts: Understanding Rumble’s Podcast Dynamics
Utkucan Balci | Jay Patel | Berkan Balci | Jeremy Blackburn
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

The rising popularity of podcasts as an emerging medium opens new avenues for digital humanities research, particularly when examining video-based media on alternative platforms. We present a novel data analysis pipeline for analyzing over 13K podcast videos (526 days of video content) from Rumble and YouTube that integrates advanced speech-to-text transcription, transformer-based topic modeling, and contrastive visual learning. We uncover the interplay between spoken rhetoric and visual elements in shaping political bias. Our findings reveal a distinct right-wing orientation in Rumble’s podcasts, contrasting with YouTube’s more diverse and apolitical content. By merging computational techniques with comparative analysis, our study advances digital humanities by demonstrating how large-scale multimodal analysis can decode ideological narratives in emerging media format.