Illuminating 2016: Helping Journalists Cover Social Media in the Presidential Campaign

This computational journalism project was developed to help political journalists by providing a useable yet comprehensive summary of the content and sentiment that flows through social media during presidential campaigns. Over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Illuminating team collected all of the Facebook and Twitter messages by the 17 Republican and five Democratic candidates. The research team also developed a system to categorize each post by message type: calls to action, image, advocacy, issue, and attack messages. This system could be applied to any campaign, and is easily searchable by journalists to find trends in and compare politicians’ communications.

Project lead: Jenny Stromer-Galley