US Election 2008 Web Monitor Nominated for the Austrian National Prize for Multimedia and e-Business
As one of the Top 3 applications in the category of "Online Communities, Web 2.0 & Social Networks", the Department of New Media Technology's US Election 2008 Web Monitor has been nominated for the Austria National Prize for Multimedia and e-Business. It is an annual award established in 1997, sponsored by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economics and Labor, which intends to honor outstanding multimedia projects.
The US Election 2008 Web Monitor is a Semantic Web application that analyzes the online coverage of the US Presidential Elections 2008. It captures the Web sites of international media, the Fortune 1000 (the biggest US companies in terms of revenue), as well as 1000 popular blogs on political issues. For each candidate, the system automatically extracts media attention, sentiment, and associated keywords.
The US08 Sentiment Quiz is a Web application that runs on top of the Facebook social networking platform. It follows the tradition of "Games with a Purpose" by inviting Facebook users and their network of online friends to evaluate whether sentences from an archive of election-related documents express positive or negative sentiment. The built-in notification system and real-time statistics on the users' progress help engage users and leverage the wisdom of the crowds for scientific purposes. Besides improving existing algorithms for automated sentiment detection, it is possible to analyze information diffusion in social networks. In combination with the users’ votes, the researchers also hope to gain new insights into the phenomenon of hostile media effects (the different perception and interpretation of content depending on the reader's political orientation).
Links
- Austrian National Prize for Multimedia and e-Business
- US Election 2008 Web Monitor
- Sentiment Quiz on Facebook
Contact
Prof. Arno Scharl
MODUL University Vienna
Department of New Media Technology
Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Vienna, Austria
scharl@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at/nmt