Echoes of Ideology: Toward an Audio Analysis Pipeline to Unveil Character Traits in Historical Nazi Propaganda Films

2026-01-12

AI Summary

This study proposes an audio analysis–based approach to uncover the ideological characteristics embodied by characters in Nazi propaganda films. By implementing a three-stage pipeline—speaker diarization, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and psycholinguistic text analysis—the work presents the first systematic application of computational audio techniques to historical political propaganda footage, enabling scalable deconstruction of ideological discourse. Experimental results demonstrate that the method effectively identifies linguistic behavioral patterns and ideological leanings of film characters, thereby validating its feasibility and innovative potential for historical media analysis.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Speech
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

Abstract

This study investigates the use of computational audio analysis to examine ideological narratives in Nazi propaganda films. Employing a three-step pipeline, speaker diarization, audio transcription and psycholinguistic analysis, it reveals ideological patterns in characters. Despite current issues with speaker diarization, the methodology provides insights into character traits and propaganda narratives, suggesting scalable applications.

Problem

• audio analysis
• ideology
• propaganda films
• character traits
• Nazi

Innovation

• audio analysis pipeline
• speaker diarization
• psycholinguistic analysis
• ideological narrative
• propaganda films