US Election Monitor 2008
PolitCamp Graz
30. Mai 2008
Hermann Stern Walter Rafelsberger
Graz University of Technology MODUL University Vienna
Knowledge Management Institute Department of New Media Technology
hermann.stern@tugraz.at walter.rafelsberger@modul.ac.at

Introduction
• US Election Monitor 2008
• Analyzing Trends in Political Coverage of Online Media
• http://www.ecoresearch.net/election2008
• Use Case of the IDIOM Project
• I f
Information Diff i across Interactive O li Media
i Diffusion I i Online M di
• http://www.idiom.at
• Part of the ECOresearch Network
• http://www.ecoresearch.net

Behind the Scenes (1/2)
( )
• Weekly Snapshots of global Web coverage
• List of Web sites in different Samples
• US
• Canada
• UK
• Australia and New Zealand
• NGOs
• Fortune1000
• 1000 popular blogs on political issues

Behind the Scenes (2/2)
( )
• More than 800 000 documents a week
800,000
• Monday: data collection
• Wednesday: publication of new results
• Text Pre-Processing
• Word Frequencies => Attention
• Semantic Orientation => Sentiment
• Keyword Analysis => Keywords

Interactive Charts

Candidate Details

User Polls
• Only one vote a day allowed (IP check)

Traffic Statistics

Attention V.S. Sentiment

Obama Public Opinion V.S. Sentiment
p

Obama Attention V.S. Sentiment

Future Work
• Candidate quotes
• User votes on geographic map
• Phase II: post primaries

Social Media Applications
pp
• „Games with a Purpose“
Games Purpose
• Vote for a Candidate
• Sentiment Quiz
• Goals
• Gather data for Social Network Analysis
• Analyze Viral Dissemination Effects
• Sentiment Detection and Evaluation
via Crowdsourcing
• Investigate Hostile Media Effect

Social Media Applications
pp
• Why Facebook et al?
• Building a new community / user base is not our task
• Social Platforms with APIs
• Environment the user is familiar with
• Still a rich user experience
• Viral effects help spreading the application in a
user`s network with limited marketing resources
• Large user base

Facebook Voting Application
g pp
• Users vote weekly for their
y
prefered candidate and give
their opinion whether he / she
will win.
• Privacy controls
• V l notifications and
Viral f d
reminders spread across a
user`s network.
• Results page offers statistics
from a user`s network.
• Opt-In to let us access the
gathered data for further
analysis.
y

Facebook Sentiment Quiz
„Game with a purpose“
p p
• Players have to decide
whether a sentence has a
positive or negative meaning.
• The choices of a player get
matched with those from
other players
players.
• Players get points for
matches and may reach
higher levels, making the
game more difficult with
longer sentences and lower
sentiment.
• Uses proven game mechanics
to motivate players.

SOC Framework as Backend
Data
• PHP based framework
• Generic wrapper for Social
Platforms to act on a shared SOC Framework
data space
• Allows logging of user activity
in a social network
Others

Future Work
• Launch Facebook Applications
• currently Private Beta
• Port Applications to other platforms
• Possible future scenario:
Crowdsourcing Platform
g
for Scientific Applications