The US Election 2008 Web Monitor is a public Web portal to capture trends in political media coverage before and after the US Presidential Election in November 2008. Each week, the underlying system aggregated and analyzed about half a million documents. The data acquisition component captured the Web sites of international media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, environmental organizations, the Fortune 1000 (the biggest US companies in terms of revenue), as well as 1000 popular blogs on political issues.

www.ecoresearch.net/election2008

The project paid particular attention to the editorial slant, defined as the quantity and tone of a Web site’s coverage as influenced by its editorial position. The observable volume of coverage and the expressed sentiment towards the candidates served as proxies of editorial slant. The system identified attention by determining the frequency of candidate references and measured sentiment towards the candidate by identifying positive and negative expressions that co-occur with these references. Keywords and perceptual maps summarized the most important topics associated with the candidates, placing special emphasis on environmental issues.

Related Resources

• US Election 2004 Web Monitor
• Scharl, A. and Weichselbraun, A. (2008): “An Automated Approach to Investigating the Online Media Coverage of US Presidential Elections”, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 5(1): 121-132.