Political Futures Tracker

Data analytics has undergone massive advances since the last UK General Election. Party campaigns will now be defined by their social media presence and the messages that they are pushing online, which means we need to find innovative ways to examine these new and rich data sources.

Nesta is working with the GATE team to create the Political Futures Tracker, a tool that will provide near-real time analysis of political texts in the run up to the 2015 UK General election. It will hone in on key topics, future thinking and sentiment, as they unfold on Twitter, party websites and in political speeches and other relevant web material.

More information and regular updates about the project can be found on the Nesta blog.

Some demo visualisations can be found here

Technical information about the underlying GATE technology:

• Topic and sentiment analysis
• Infrastructure: real-time annotation and indexing of live Twitter streams
• Analysis and visualisation of the results

Key Sheffield people involved:

• Kalina Bontcheva
• Mark Greenwood
• Diana Maynard
• Ian Roberts

Publications:

• A. Dietzel and D. Maynard. Climate Change: A Chance for Political Re-Engagement? In Proc. of the Political Studies Association 65th Annual International Conference, April 2015, Sheffield, UK. PDF

• D. Maynard, M. A. Greenwood, I. Roberts, G. Windsor, K. Bontcheva. Real-time Social Media Analytics through Semantic Annotation and Linked Open Data. Proceedings of WebSci 2015, Oxford, UK. Short paper

WebSci 2015 Poster: PDF of poster