Researching networks of hyperlinks, text and Twitter from the U.S. General election: It’s happening NOW!

As part of their assessment, students from the Sonic Lab at Northwestern University were requested to work with data from diverse online sources, covering the U.S. general election. The U.S. election is a popular, timely and relevant topic, which has generated a large amount of online data -therefore- possibilities for networks analysis.

As for the data sources, VOSON is used to collect and analyze hyperlinks, in order to understand network structure and hyperlink behavior. For Twitter networks, Uberlink provided structured datasets (Twitter Analytics Service) containing 1.4+ million tweets with hashtags in the context of the U.S. general election. The other proposed tool is R, to be used for network analysis and to study co-occurrence of text content from the New York times.

Professor Noshir Contractor has been teaching VOSON for the last 6 years in his Social Network Analysis and Predictive Analytics courses at Northwestern University.