2012 Proceeding- Program Chairs:
- Ingmar Weber,
- Ana-Maria Popescu,
- Marco Pennacchiotti
It is our pleasure to welcome you to the first edition of the Politics, Elections and Data workshop (PLEAD at CIKM 2012). The goal of this workshop, taking place a few days before the 2012 U.S. presidential elections, is to bring together researchers working at the intersection of social network analysis, computational social science and political science, to share and discuss their ideas in a common forum; and to inspire further developments in this growing, fascinating field of computational political science.
The call for papers attracted submissions from researchers in different areas and from different countries, which underscores the wide appeal of computational political science. The program committee accepted 6 papers which cover a variety of topics: measuring the online popularity of political campaigns, the adoption of social networking platforms by members of the political class and the feasibility of characterizing political communities by tracking topics in the message streams of their members, analyzing patterns in candidate funding to discern the state of a political party, mining opinions on politically controversial topics and finally, analyzing the effects of voter microtargeting and proposing solutions for mitigating the more worrisome aspects.
In addition, the program includes a keynote speech from Filippo Menczer on "The Diffusion of Political Memes in Social Media". Filippo presents ongoing work on the study of information diffusion in social media with a focus on polarization, cross-ideological communication and partisan asymmetries in online political activities. The workshop will also feature a presentation of existing online tools for political analysis and a panel discussion with industry, academia and media participants.
Proceeding Downloads
The diffusion of political memes in social media: keynote abstract
This talk presents ongoing work on the study of information diffusion in social media, focusing in particular on political communication in the Twitter microblogging network. Social media platforms play an important role in shaping political discourse ...
Political polarization and popularity in online participatory media: an integrated approach
We present our approach to online popularity and its applications to political science, aiming at the creation of agent-based models that reproduce patterns of popularity in participatory media. We illustrate our approach analyzing a dataset from ...
Party cohesion in presidential races: applying social network theory to the 2011 preprimary
In this paper we analyze individual contributions data from the 2012 Republican Party preprimary that was collected by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). We use the basic principles of Social Network Analysis of multiple donors to discern patterns ...
Opinions network for politically controversial topics
This paper describes OpinioNetIt, a structured, faceted, knowledge-base of opinions, and its use in political opinions analysis. OpinioNetIt consists of information about people, topics and opinions in the form of person, opinion, topic triples, ...
French presidential elections: what are the most efficient measures for tweets?
Tweets exchanged over the Internet are an important source of information even if their characteristics make them difficult to analyze (e.g., a maximum of 140 characters; noisy data). In this paper, we address the problem of extracting relevant topics ...
The price of precision: voter microtargeting and its potential harms to the democratic process
This paper explores the potentially perverse effects of voter microtargeting, delineating how the very same techniques that empower political candidates to be more efficient and effective in their campaigning may also undermine the political and social ...
