MIT Media Lab researchers have developed the "Electome,? a tool for comparing the content of Twitter conversations with news media coverage of the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign. The image here shows a spike in tweets about foreign policy, national security, and terrorism after NBC’s ?Commander-in-Chief? forum on Sept. 7.
During an intense U.S. presidential campaign, millions of people are chatting about the election every day on Twitter. MIT is studying them. More precisely, the Laboratory for Social Machines, part of the MIT Media Lab, has launched a project called the Electome that charts Twitter in unique detail. Now the project has joined forces with the Commission on Presidential Debates - the first debate is tonight - to provide journalists with a 'dashboard' summarizing Twitter use during the debates. MIT News talked to three key Electome researchers about their work: Deb Roy, director of the Laboratory for Social Machines and chief media scientist for Twitter; William Powers, long-time journalist, author, and now research scientist for the Electome project; and Russell Stevens, deployment lead for the Electome project. This has been edited for length. Q: What is the Electome and how does it work? Deb Roy: It begins with taking two data sources: 30 English news sources and the fire hose of tweets from Twitter.
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