Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Screenshot of 24 of 27 Democratic candidates  hopeful of the Presidential nomination on May 25, 2019 (Source: The Washington Post) In our previous post,  Twitter Follower Growth for the 2020 Democratic Candidates , we used the Twitter follower growth between 2019-01-01 and 2019-08-23 as a proxy to measure popularity of the Democratic candidates and categorized the campaign of each candidate based on their absolute Twitter follower growth into four categories: already popular, big winners, nobody noticed, and beneficial .  Since our previous post, all the candidates except Joe Biden, the presumptive presidential nominee, have dropped out. In this post, we revisit the Twitter follower growth of all 27 Democratic candidates by extending our study to between 2019-01-01 and 2020-04-18. We plotted an  interactive D3 Twitter follower graph to show the trends in the absolute increase of the followers for each candidate .    Twitter and Web Arc...

Figure 1: Popularity measure of the candidates labeled on the basis of their Twitter follower growth in absolute number and percentage There are more than 20 candidates running for the 2020 Democratic party Presidential nomination  but everyone knows there will be only one winner. Since only a handful of the candidates have a real shot of receiving the nomination, the question then arises "why are so many candidates running for their party's nomination?" One answer is that running for the nomination increases a candidate's national media coverage and the resulting popularity creates a launchpad for their future endeavors. This is clearly evident in case of candidates like  Pete Buttigieg  and  Andrew Yang , both of whom have enjoyed increased national exposure regardless of the outcome of the primaries. Since "popularity" is hard to define and quantify, we use the  Twitter followers for each candidate as a proxy for their popularity. The ab...

"Team Turtle" in Archive Unleashed in Washington DC (from left to right: N. Chah, S. Marti, M. Aturban , and I. Amin) The first presidential debate (H. Clinton v. D. Trump) took place on last Monday, September 26, 2016 at Hofstra University , New York. The questions were about topics like economy, taxes, jobs, and race. During the debate, the candidates mentioned those topics (and other issues) and, in many cases, they associated a topic with a particular place or a US state (e.g., shootings in Chicago, Illinois, and crime rate in New York). This reminded me about the work that we had done in the second Archives Unleashed Hackathon , held at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. I worked with the "Team Turtle" ( Niel Chah , Steve Marti , Mohamed Aturban , and Imaduddin Amin ) on analyzing an archived collection, provided by the Library of Congress, about the 2004 Presidential Election (G. Bush v. J. Kerry). The collection contained hundreds of archived w...