Five months before the US Presidential Election 2016 and in time for the upcoming Democratic and Republican conventions, a team of European researchers has just released a novel Web intelligence platform to track the public dialog and the candidates‚ performance on the campaign trail. Real-time analyses of online coverage based on the webLyzard Web intelligence platform of MODUL University Vienna reveal opinion leaders, shed light on how events impact the coverage, and compare the perceptions of social media users with the editorial position of news media and NGOs.
The US Presidential Election 2016 is remarkable in many ways. Slightly more than a month before the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, neither party has managed to put its entire weight behind their respective candidate. It took until June for Hillary Clinton to gather enough votes in the primary, while her opponent Donald Trump is one of the most polarizing candidates ever. With media attention on the rise, many observers wonder whether we will witness genuine political debate in the months to come, or if entertainment value will overshadow rational arguments. How is this unusual presidential race perceived by citizens and various stakeholder groups? The US Election 2016 Web Monitor, publicly available at http://us2016.weblyzard.com/, provides answers to this question.
Trends that Shape Social Perceptions
Project spokesperson, Prof. Arno Scharl from MODUL University Vienna’s Department of New Media Technology, outlines how the interactive Web application gives a unique view of the diverging perceptions of different stakeholder groups. „There have been many attempts at monitoring the campaign performance of presidential candidates, but most of them focus on public opinion polls or media monitoring solutions limited to simple statistical representations“, he said. „Our Web intelligence platform, by contrast, provides automated knowledge extraction and visual data exploration along multiple context dimensions, in real time and embedded into a powerful dashboard.“ Officially launching the Web platform with an invited talk hosted by the US Embassy in Vienna, Prof. Scharl described the underlying method and presented a range of visualizations that allow a closer examination of the gathered data – in order to better understand social perceptions of the candidates and identify events that shape these perceptions.
Real-Time Intelligence from Online Sources
The project analyzes user-generated content from social media, articles of international news media, and the online publications of NGOs. Processing these content streams yields more than 8 million relevant documents per month. Automated knowledge extraction services classify and enrich the collected documents. Sentiment, for example, is measured by associating these references with positive and negative expressions. Keywords, grouped by political party or geographic region, reflect events and emerging stories associated with the candidates.
The US Election 2016 Web Monitor is jointly pursued by researchers of MODUL University Vienna, webLyzard technology, Vienna University of Economics and Business and HTW Chur in Switzerland, who have a long history of successful collaboration. A monitoring application for the US Election 2008 won the „Online Communities, Web 2.0 and Social Networks“ category of the „Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business“.
Further information
- Election monitor – http://us2016.weblyzard.com/
Images available at:
- http://www.modul.ac.at/nmt/media-resources
About MODUL University Vienna (Status June 2016)
MODUL University Vienna is an international private university in Austria and is owned by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. It offers study programs (BBA, BSc, MSc, MBA and PhD programs) in the areas of international business and management, new media technology, public governance & administration and sustainable development, as well as tourism and hospitality management (www.modul.ac.at/study-programs). The study programs meet strict accreditation guidelines and, due to their international focus, are conducted in English. The university campus is located at Kahlenberg, in Vienna’s 19th district. The research of the Institute for New Media Technology (www.modul.ac.at/nmt) focuses on the impact of online media and social networks on stakeholder communication and public opinion-formation processes, and on how such processes can be recorded, analyzed and visualized using semantic technologies. The webLyzard platform (www.weblyzard.com), which forms the basis of the US Election 2016 Web Monitor, is currently being further developed within the context of major EU research projects in the 7th Framework and H2020 Programs including DecarboNet (www.decarbonet.eu), Pheme (www.pheme.eu), ASAP (www.asap-fp7.eu), and InVID (www.invid-project.eu).
Scientific Contact & Copy Editing:
Prof. Arno Scharl
MODUL University Vienna
Department of New Media Technology
Am Kahlenberg 1
1190 Vienna, Austria
T +43 / 1 / 320 3555 – 500
M +43 / 664 / 8463919
E scharl@modul.ac.at
W www.modul.ac.at/nmt
Distribution:
PR&D – Public Relations for Research & Education
Mariannengasse 8
1090 Vienna, Austria
T +43 / 1 / 505 70 44
W www.prd.at