Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Computer Science Graduate Society (CSGS) of the Old Dominion University organized a Hackathon from October 24 to November 1, 2024. The competition featured three teams from the master's category and three from the PhD category, each presenting innovative projects. Participants chose from five research topics provided by the organizing committee. Two teams from the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group participated in the hackathon: Binary Bandits ( David Calano and Dominik Soos ) and our team, Titans ( Himarsha Jayanetti , Kritika Garg , and Kumushini Thennakoon ).  We won the PhD category with our project, "Tracking Political Trends Around the US Presidential Election.” This was a mini project completed within a limited time frame, making it a fast-paced challenge. Despite the constraints, our team tackled various obstacles in collecting and analyzing data. In this blog post, we provide an overview of our project and highlight its key contribution...

Figure 1: Daily Twitter follower growth rate for  @joebiden  and  @realDonaldTrump On January 6, 2021, the US Congress certified Joe Biden as the 46th US President .  On January 8, 2021, Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account , fallout from his tweets regarding the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath of the events since Election Day up until the permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump , we compared the follower growth of the personal Twitter accounts of  the 45th US President Donald Trump ( @realDonaldTrump ) and the 46th US President Joe Biden ( @joebiden ) between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12.  We have also provided the historical Twitter follower count information for @joebiden and @realDonaldTrump  used for this analysis.  Although  @joebiden  gained approximately nine times the Twitter followers as  @realDonaldTrump  between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12,  ...