Libby Hemphill, "Elected Officials and Social Media"

ELECTED OFFICIALS ON SOCIAL MEDIALibby Hemphill, PhDAssistant Professor of Communication and Information StudiesIllinois Institute of [email protected]

Questions from Group• What’s the bias on Twitter?• Are Republicans more tightly connected?• - What do they do in free time? (Which bars do they go to?)

- Where are they tweeting from? (location)- What do they respond to?- How engaging are they (tweets, not officials?)- Tweet-content versus voting record- What lobbyists/special interest groups do they tweet about/follow/etc?- How much do they interact (via tweets) with outside groups- How does their tweeting correlate to offline activity (eg polls)- Is Twitter it (for social media), eg., #fb- What is the sentiment of their posts- Diffs between Individual vs. party posts- How many people/Who do they follow- Adoption (Are they/how are they? ...do they like it?)- demographics of their followers- differences between "official" versus campaign vs personal (accounts/how many, what kind)- How many tweets are "spontaneous vs crafted"- How do talking points change/evolve over time?- How does their language change/evolve over time?- How many are bilingual (what languages?)- What do they misspell?- Do they like (twitter) or not?- How frequently are they re-tweeted and how far do they go (depth/diffusion)- Which lobbyists/special interest groups do they spend time with?- How does their language (tweet word choice) vary from official statements- What pics do they post about themselves- How do they frame their issues? (lang/sentiment/etc)- How do people respond the their tweets?- What is their “agenda”- What devices do they use to tweet

I wonder…• Whether officials are always talking about their next TV appearance• Whether officials use Twitter to get people to do something like give

money or help out at a community event• Whether national and local officials use Twitter differently• Who tweets with their officials• How what we and our officials do on Twitter effects the “real” world• If Twitter is a virtual echo chamber in which officials interact mainly

with themselves• How officials’ use RTs, mentions, and hashtags• How much of this stuff is unique to Americans? Or Chicagoans? Or

Republicans• Are officials really tweeting, or is it all staffers in a post-Weiner era• How what they’re talking about Twitter differs from what they’re

talking about elsewhere like MSNBC or Fox News appearances• What clues the language they use gives us about how they’ll vote• How the language they use influences what we do with their tweets

Technology Toolkit

Getting and Storing Data

• MySQL• MongoDB• PHP• Ruby• Python• Perl• Dropbox• Github• Amazon Web Services

Processing and Analyzing Data

• MALLET• NodeXL• UCINet• R• Stata• Excel• Word• PowerPoint

Why so many?

• Students come in with different skills• Existing tools focus on topics, but we focus on people

• Ongoing data collection• Different representations for different outlets

• Two-mode networks have different requirements

Datasets

“Mine”

• U.S. Congress • Speech acts• Mentioning each other• Hashtags (one-mode,

two-mode)• Links (one-mode, two-mode)

• Korean National Assembly• Speech acts

• Members of the EU Parliament (coming soon)

Re-used

• Twitter Streaming API• DW-NOMINATE• Congress.org• Fowler’s Co-sponsorship• Census and American

Community Survey• OpenSecrets.org

Takeaways

• Resources matter• Found data can be sexy but dangerous• Keep track of the steps you took between idea and paper (~= metadata)

• Think long term about your work

More Info• Email: [email protected]• Twitter: @libbyh• Web: http://www.libbyh.com and http://www.casmlab.org

Libby Hemphill, "Elected Officials and Social Media"

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