Oxford Internet Institute

19 May 2015

Authors: Jonathan Bright

Along with consultants and advisors and large-scale data management platforms from Obama’s hugely successful digital campaigns, all the main political parties used an arsenal of social media and digital ... Read More Digital era political parties post #GE2015

8 May 2015

Authors: Jonathan Bright

GE2015 turned out to be a bad night for some. Beyond the obvious political parties, the reputation of polling firms took a big hit: while the exit poll got ... Read More Could social media forecast political movements?

8 May 2015

Authors: Jonathan Bright

In previous posts we’ve looked at people mentioning local party candidates on Twitter. In that post we basically assumed that people mentioning local candidates were based in the same ... Read More Where do people mention candidates on Twitter?

8 May 2015

Authors: Jonathan Bright

Taha and Stefano previously looked at the distribution of Wikipedia pages by candidate. These pages are much more patchy than Twitter handles: only in the Conservative and Labour cases ... Read More Which parties were most read on Wikipedia?

7 May 2015

Authors: Jonathan Bright

The last post looked at mention activity for each British constituency. What would happen if we took these mentions to be votes? Does this reaction from social media offer ... Read More What if mentions were votes?

7 May 2015

Authors: Jonathan Bright

The previous two posts have shown that the amount of effort parties are putting in on Twitter at the local level is pretty variable. But what about the response ... Read More Which parties are having the most impact on Twitter?

7 May 2015

Authors: Jonathan Bright

The UK’s national election is decided on a constituency basis: 650 odd separate small elections, each returning one MP. Despite the obvious importance of national parties and their leaders ... Read More The (local) General Election on Twitter

6 May 2015

Authors: Helen Margetts

The Oxford West and Abingdon hopefuls recreated in Lego for BBC Radio Oxford by Andrew Beaumont. #GE2015 is the ‘is it a social media election?’ election. Most usually the ... Read More Social media are not just for elections

3 May 2015

Authors: Taha Yasseri

Some have called the forthcoming UK general election a Social Media Election. It might be a bit of exaggeration, but there is no doubt that both candidates and voters are very ... Read More Online presence of the General Election Candidates: Labour wins Twitter while Tories take Wikipedia

29 April 2015

Authors: Eve Ahearn

Following the April 2nd Leaders’ Debate the media portrayed Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, as the victor of the night, or at least a victor. ... Read More What does it mean to win a debate anyway?: Media Coverage of the Leaders’ Debates vs. Google Search Trends

25 April 2015

Authors: Eve Ahearn

By Eve Ahearn and Taha Yasseri. Reading niche political party Wikipedia pages, as one does when working on the Social Election Prediction project, one might wonder if there are any trends in ... Read More Everyone’s Reading About Greece – European Language Political Wikipedia

23 April 2015

Authors: Taha Yasseri

Will the real Grant Shapps please stand up? ViciousCritic/Totally Socks, (CC BY-NC-SA) You must have heard about the recent accusation of Grant Shapps by the Guardian. Basically, the Guardian ... Read More Wikipedia and Shapps: Sockpuppetry, Conflict of Interest, or None?

21 April 2015

Authors: Josh Cowls

Grant Shapps is in the headlines after being accused of self-serving edits made to his own entry on Wikipedia, as well as unflattering changes made to rivals’ pages. But he may ... Read More The MPs whose Wikipedia pages have been edited from inside parliament

16 April 2015

Authors: Eve Ahearn

Wikipedia places among the top Google results for almost all topics, including political parties and politicians. Wikipedia places among the top Google results for almost all topics – including ... Read More A Brief History of Political Wikipedia

25 February 2015

Authors: Eve Ahearn

The election results on this Wikipedia page are wrong, I can tell. As we collect data for the Social Election Prediction Project, I am reviewing many a Wikipedia political party ... Read More The Ethics of Wikipedia Research

6 February 2015

Authors: Eve Ahearn

“There remains a mistaken belief that qualitative researchers are in the business of interpreting stories and quantitative researchers are in the business of producing facts.” (boyd & Crawford, 2012) ... Read More Subjectivity and Data Collection in a “Big Data” Project

18 September 2014

Authors: Jonathan Bright

My colleague Taha Yasseri and I are currently working on a Fell Fund project on social media data and election prediction, looking especially at data from Google and Wikipedia (first paper ... Read More Scotland’s independence referendum on Wikipedia

30 April 2014

Authors: Jonathan Bright

CAPTION Just wanted to put up a quick plug for the euandi voting advice application [VAA] which has recently been launched by the European University Institute. I was one of the 100 ... Read More Creating transnational political links with euandi and Facebook

22 April 2014

Authors: Taha Yasseri

by Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri. Online political information seeking, at least in the data we’ve gathered so far, happens in short, concentrated bursts. When we began the project, I (JB) ... Read More Media effect or media replacement?

11 April 2014

Authors: Taha Yasseri

by Jonathan Bright and Taha Yasseri. In the last post we looked at patterns of access to the Wikipedia article on the European Parliament election, 2009 identified an electoral information cycle which consists of a build ... Read More Outliers on the electoral information cycle