Does anyone read Wikipedia around election time?
I already have written about the Wikipedia-Shapps story. So, that is not the main topic of this post! But when that topic was still hot, some people asked me whether I think anyone ever actually reads...
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Social media are not just for elections
The Oxford West and Abingdon hopefuls recreated in Lego for BBC Radio Oxford by Andrew Beaumont. #GE2015 is the ‘is it a social media election?’ election. Most usually the question has been asked only...
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The (local) General Election on Twitter
The UK’s national election is decided on a constituency basis: 650 odd separate small elections, each returning one MP. Despite the obvious importance of national parties and their leaders for shaping...
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Which parties are having the most impact on Twitter?
The previous two posts have shown that the amount of effort parties are putting in on Twitter at the local level is pretty variable. But what about the response they are getting? In this post we’ll...
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What if mentions were votes?
The last post looked at mention activity for each British constituency. What would happen if we took these mentions to be votes? Does this reaction from social media offer any potential insight into...
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Which parties were most read on Wikipedia?
Taha and Stefano previously looked at the distribution of Wikipedia pages by candidate. These pages are much more patchy than Twitter handles: only in the Conservative and Labour cases do more than 40%...
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Where do people mention candidates on Twitter?
In previous posts we’ve looked at people mentioning local party candidates on Twitter. In that post we basically assumed that people mentioning local candidates were based in the same constituency as...
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Could social media forecast political movements?
GE2015 turned out to be a bad night for some. Beyond the obvious political parties, the reputation of polling firms took a big hit: while the exit poll got more or less in the ball park, none of the...
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Digital Disconnect: Parties, Pollsters and Political Analysis in #GE2015
‘Congratulations to my friend @Messina2012 on his role in the resounding Conservative victory in Britain’ tweeted David Axelrod, campaign advisor to Miliband, to his former colleague Jim Messina,...
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Digital era political parties post #GE2015
Along with consultants and advisors and large-scale data management platforms from Obama’s hugely successful digital campaigns, all the main political parties used an arsenal of social media and...
View ArticleSocial predictions in Iran, Germany and the UK
New short paper to appear in Information Technology (guest editors Katrin Weller & Markus Strohmaier). Basic argument: we won’t get political predictions out of the social web without...
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When do people start getting interested in elections? The electoral...
by Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri. When do people start getting interested in elections, and how does this differ in different countries? In this post we try to get a handle on this question looking...
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Outliers on the electoral information cycle
by Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri. In the last post we looked at patterns of access to the Wikipedia article on the European Parliament election, 2009 identified an electoral information cycle which...
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Media effect or media replacement?
by Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri. Online political information seeking, at least in the data we’ve gathered so far, happens in short, concentrated bursts. When we began the project, I (JB) was...
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Creating transnational political links with euandi and Facebook
CAPTION Just wanted to put up a quick plug for the euandi voting advice application [VAA] which has recently been launched by the European University Institute. I was one of the 100 or so political...
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Scotland’s independence referendum on Wikipedia
My colleague Taha Yasseri and I are currently working on a Fell Fund project on social media data and election prediction, looking especially at data from Google and Wikipedia (first paper out soon;...
View ArticleSubjectivity and Data Collection in a “Big Data” Project
“There remains a mistaken belief that qualitative researchers are in the business of interpreting stories and quantitative researchers are in the business of producing facts.” (boyd & Crawford,...
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The Ethics of Wikipedia Research
The election results on this Wikipedia page are wrong, I can tell. As we collect data for the Social Election Prediction Project, I am reviewing many a Wikipedia political party page and every so...
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A Brief History of Political Wikipedia
Wikipedia places among the top Google results for almost all topics, including political parties and politicians. Wikipedia places among the top Google results for almost all topics – including...
View ArticleThe MPs whose Wikipedia pages have been edited from inside parliament
Grant Shapps is in the headlines after being accused of self-serving edits made to his own entry on Wikipedia, as well as unflattering changes made to rivals’ pages. But he may not be the only...
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