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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2017: Social Informatics pp 201–217Cite as

Event Analysis on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Using Social Media

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 10539)

Abstract

It is not surprising that social media have played an important role in shaping the political debate during the 2016 presidential election. The dynamics of social media provide a unique opportunity to detect and interpret the pivotal events and scandals of the candidates quantitatively. This paper examines several text-based analysis to determine which topics have a lasting impact on the election for the two main candidates, Clinton and Trump. About 135.5 million tweets are collected over the six weeks prior to the election. From these tweets, topic clustering, keyword extraction, and tweeter analysis are performed to better understand the impact of the events occurred during this period. Our analysis builds upon a social science foundation to provide another avenue for scholars to use in discerning how events detected from social media show the impacts of campaigns as well as campaign the election.

Keywords

  • Presidential election
  • Topic clustering
  • Keyword extraction
  • Twitter analysis
  • Social media

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_13
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Notes

  1. 1.

    Twitter Streaming API: https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/overview.

  2. 2.

    New York Times API: https://developer.nytimes.com/archive_api.json.

  3. 3.

    See sielsen’s ratings: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2016/first-presidential-debate-of-2016-draws-84-million-viewers.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Tarrek A. Shaban, Lindsay Hexter & Jinho D. Choi

Authors
  1. Tarrek A. Shaban
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  2. Lindsay Hexter
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  3. Jinho D. Choi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tarrek A. Shaban .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Afra Mashhadi

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Dr. Taha Yasseri

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Shaban, T.A., Hexter, L., Choi, J.D. (2017). Event Analysis on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Using Social Media. In: Ciampaglia, G., Mashhadi, A., Yasseri, T. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10539. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_13

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