US Election 2008 Web Monitor

The US08 Media Watch provides a comprehensive and continuously updated archive of media coverage on the US Presidential Election 2008. The project analyses the Web sites of the Fortune 1000 (the largest US corporations ranked by revenue), 50 environmental organizations, 1000 popular blogs on political issues, and international media from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week. Automated algorithms identify attention by counting references to a candidate, and measure sentiment by associating these references with positive and negative terms. Keywords, grouped by political party and geographic region, reflect current events associated with the candidates.

Interactive visualizations help understand the complex semantic relationships (information landscape, geographic map, ontology graph and tag cloud; the 'Help' function provides a detailed interface description).

Project Background and Acknowledgements

The US Election 2008 Web Monitor is developed as part of the IDIOM (Information Diffusion across Interactive Online Media) research project. IDIOM places special emphasis on the compatibility of its services with multiple platforms, and will publish several core components under an open source license (e.g. the geotagging and semantic mapping services).

Based on the Gentics J2EE platform, the current prototype has been jointly developed by Alexander Hubmann-Haidvogel (view synchronization, full-text search), Martin Loitzl (semantic map), Walter Rafelsberger (tag cloud, interface design), Arno Scharl (project lead, conceptualization), Hermann Stern (geotagging service, geographic map), Albert Weichselbraun (technical lead), Gerhard Wohlgenannt (content aggregation and annotation), and Dimitri Zibold (semantic map, ontology).

Contact: Arno Scharl, MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology.

Acknowledgement: The IDIOM research project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) within the strategic objective FIT-IT Semantic Systems. We would like to thank Vedran Sabol from Know-Center Graz for his invaluable help in implementing the semantic map's force-directed placement and rendering algorithms.

Interface Design and Map Synchronization

The content view in the upper left window shows the active document, including its mirror date and source/target geography. Below, just-in-time information retrieval agents list documents referring to similar topics and nearby locations. Clicking on the related references extends the quoted text, clicking on the circular marker on the left activates that particular document.

The various maps on the right side facilitate access to the underlying knowledge base. The 'Ontology' view displays an automatically generated domain ontology, matching documents and concepts to help users determine their current location in the information space. The 'Semantic Map' (=information landscape) reflects the semantic associations between documents. Peaks indicate clusters of documents about a popular topic, whereas valleys represent sparsely populated parts of the information space. A geographic map shows the locations referred to in the listed documents. Clicking on the 'max' links increases the size of the maps. Maps can be rearranged by dragging and switched on/off using the buttons in the top bar.

The '3D' link of the semantic map links to a description of knowledge planets as a new interface metaphor. The 'KML' link of the geographic map points towards a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file that requires a geobrowser to display 100 news items on a three-dimensional virtual globe.

Once users enter a search query, an additional window displays quotes including the target term as 'concordances' (centering the target term and showing its immediate context in the various documents).

Besides entering query terms, users can click on ANY position in the maps (not only on the document markers) to retrieve articles related to that particular location, topic or domain concept. The different views are therefore said to be 'tightly coupled': User actions in one window trigger an immediate update of all other displays.

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This news archive keeps a record of the 10.000 most recent documents reporting on the US Presidential Candidates. Unfortunately, the article that you are looking for is no longer available. Please close this window and use the search box in the upper left corner to find out whether there is updated information available.