PolitCamp 2008 Election Monitor Presentation. Hermann Stern and Walter Rafelsberger.

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Interactive Charts

6. Candidate Details

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

8. Traffic Statistics

9. Attention V.S. Sentiment

10. Obama Public Opinion V.S. Sentiment
p

11. Obama Attention V.S. Sentiment

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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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.

17. 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

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