1. ELECTED OFFICIALS
ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Libby Hemphill, PhD
Assistant Professor of Communication and
Information Studies
Illinois Institute of Technology
libbyh@gmail.com

2. Questions from Group
• What’s the bias on Twitter?
• Are Republicans more tightly connected?
• - What do they do in free time? (Which bars do they go to?)
- Where are they tweeting from? (location)
- What do they respond to?
- How engaging are they (tweets, not officials?)
- Tweet-content versus voting record
- What lobbyists/special interest groups do they tweet about/follow/etc?
- How much do they interact (via tweets) with outside groups
- How does their tweeting correlate to offline activity (eg polls)
- Is Twitter it (for social media), eg., #fb
- What is the sentiment of their posts
- Diffs between Individual vs. party posts
- How many people/Who do they follow
- Adoption (Are they/how are they? ...do they like it?)
- demographics of their followers
- differences between "official" versus campaign vs personal (accounts/how many, what kind)
- How many tweets are "spontaneous vs crafted"
- How do talking points change/evolve over time?
- How does their language change/evolve over time?
- How many are bilingual (what languages?)
- What do they misspell?
- Do they like (twitter) or not?
- How frequently are they re-tweeted and how far do they go (depth/diffusion)
- Which lobbyists/special interest groups do they spend time with?
- How does their language (tweet word choice) vary from official statements
- What pics do they post about themselves
- How do they frame their issues? (lang/sentiment/etc)
- How do people respond the their tweets?
- What is their “agenda”
- What devices do they use to tweet

3. I wonder…
• Whether officials are always talking about their next TV appearance
• Whether officials use Twitter to get people to do something like give
money or help out at a community event
• Whether national and local officials use Twitter differently
• Who tweets with their officials
• How what we and our officials do on Twitter effects the “real” world
• If Twitter is a virtual echo chamber in which officials interact mainly
with themselves
• How officials’ use RTs, mentions, and hashtags
• How much of this stuff is unique to Americans? Or Chicagoans? Or
Republicans
• Are officials really tweeting, or is it all staffers in a post-Weiner era
• How what they’re talking about Twitter differs from what they’re
talking about elsewhere like MSNBC or Fox News appearances
• What clues the language they use gives us about how they’ll vote
• How the language they use influences what we do with their tweets

4. Technology Toolkit
Getting and Storing Data Processing and Analyzing Data
• MySQL • MALLET
• MongoDB • NodeXL
• PHP • UCINet
• Ruby •R
• Python • Stata
• Perl • Excel
• Dropbox • Word
• Github • PowerPoint
• Amazon Web Services

5. Why so many?
• Students come in with different skills
• Existing tools focus on topics, but we focus
on people
• Ongoing data collection
• Different representations for different
outlets
• Two-mode networks have different
requirements

6. Datasets
“Mine” Re-used
• U.S. Congress • Twitter Streaming API
• Speech acts
• DW-NOMINATE
• Mentioning each other
• Hashtags (one-mode,
• Congress.org
two-mode) • Fowler’s Co-sponsorship
• Links (one-mode, two-mode)
• Census and American
• Korean National
Community Survey
Assembly
• Speech acts • OpenSecrets.org
• Members of the EU
Parliament (coming soon)

7. Takeaways
• Resources matter
• Found data can be sexy but dangerous
• Keep track of the steps you took between
idea and paper (~= metadata)
• Think long term about your work

8. More Info
• Email: libbyh@gmail.com
• Twitter: @libbyh
• Web: http://www.libbyh.com and http://www.casmlab.org