Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The US Election 2008 Web Monitor has been awarded the First Prize in the category 'Online Communities, Web 2.0 and Social Networks' of the Austrian National Award for Multimedia and e-Business. After tracking candidate performance during the primaries and continuously refining the analyses, the development team took this opportunity to re-launch the Web site at www.ecoresearch.net/election2008. The project now focuses on the presidential candidates and their running mates, supplements the analytical tools with semantic and geospatial interfaces, and includes two social media applications built upon the Facebook platform.

The award-winning media monitoring application uses two Facebook applications to gain new scientific insights. The first application lets users vote for and track their preferred candidates. The second application called 'Sentiment Quiz' follows the tradition of games with a purpose by inviting Facebook users and their network of online friends to evaluate whether quotes from an archive of election-related documents express positive or negative sentiment. Besides improving algorithms for automated sentiment detection, the system analyzes information diffusion in social networks and leverages the wisdom of the crowds for investigating individual perceptions of Web documents with political content.

The US Election 2008 Web Monitor embraces the influential role of social media in the US presidential elections and analyzes the online coverage by different stakeholders. For this purpose, 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 from a repository of 800,000 Web documents.

On September 30th, the Department of New Media Technology of MODUL University Vienna will host a presentation by Steven Clemons, Senior Fellow and Director of the American Strategy Program and publisher of “The Washington Note”. He will talk about "Electing the US President: Do New Media, Blogs and the Net Make a Difference?" and share his expertise on social media usage - a topic that resonates well with the research focus of the US Election 2008 Web Monitor. Visitors will also hear a short presentation about the award-winning application and its approach towards tracking the candidates' performance on the Web. Further details about the event, including how to register, are available at www.modul.ac.at/nmt/0809-presentation-steven-clemons.

Links

• US Election 2008 Web Monitor - www.ecoresearch.net/election2008
• US08 Sentiment Quiz - apps.facebook.com/sentiment-quiz/
• Award Photos - www.ecoresearch.net/election2008/download
• Austrian National Prize for Multimedia and e-Business

Contact
Walter Rafelsberger, MODUL University Vienna, Department of New Media Technology, Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Wien, Austria
walter.rafelsberger@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at/nmt