QUT's Social Media Research Group (SMRG) and Hypometer™ start-up are turning their cutting-edge social media analytics to the New South Wales state election campaign.
The research partnership has developed the New South Wales Election Social Index (NSWESI), which tracks parties and candidates and evaluates public sentiment towards them.
SMRG leader Professor Axel Bruns said the index provided the most comprehensive, real-time overview of the key social media trends in any Australian election to date.
"Following our real-time tracking of the Queensland campaign in January, we are now stepping up our analytical approach by adding in some experimental sentiment analysis," Professor Bruns said.
"Accurately evaluating the sentiment of individual messages is exceptionally difficult because current sentiment analysis tools have a hard time dealing with irony and sarcasm.
"However, in aggregate we hope to see a number of useful trends around specific parties and candidates.
"Overall, our established, academically rigorous analytics methods provide clear, reliable figures on the current campaign trends, documenting the impact of specific campaign events, policy releases, controversies and gaffes.
"Through our partnership with Hypometer we are able to provide these as ready-made, embeddable graphs that can be used by websites, news organisations and the public alike."
NSWESI builds on the Hypometer, an application that allows users to create social media portals on any topic.
Hypometer technology was used in the SMRG's analysis of social media activity during the 2015 Queensland election and the 2014 G20 Summit in Brisbane.
The Hypometer's Lead Data Analyst, Katie Prowd, said the product provided innovative functionality for tracking, ranking and visualising social media activity around major topics, events and brands.
"Events such as election campaigns are a great opportunity to demonstrate the versatility of applications for Hypometer technology," Ms Prowd said.
"Our proprietary algorithm is largely automated, so we are able to quickly compile and track a range of hashtags, keywords and accounts, and to pull out the key messages and events in every conversation.
"The NSW election Hypometer draws on Twitter data and performs a range of custom analytics on the raw data to generate useful and reliable trends graphs for the various political actors.
"This offers clear insights into how the election campaign is unfolding."
Professor Bruns said the total volume of social media activity around political candidates and election themes was relatively low early in the campaign, meaning even small changes in the number of tweets about specific issues or particular parties resulted in trending topics.
"This is likely to change as we approach the business end of the campaign," Professor Bruns said.
"However, a clear trend already emerging from the election index is that the Liberal Party and its candidates are being discussed significantly more than the ALP.
"This is likely to be an indication of the benefits of incumbency: during the Queensland state election in January, the LNP government was similarly in the focus of Twitter commenters."
The New South Wales Election Social Index can be found at http://bit.ly/nswvotes2015.
Full-size, continuously updated, embeddable versions of the three NSWESI graphs are available at:
•http://dev.thehypometer.com/images/election-allparty.png
•http://dev.thehypometer.com/images/election-sentiment.png
•http://dev.thehypometer.com/images/election-2party.png
Hypometer is a QUT-based commercial start-up which tracks, ranks and visualises social media activity around any topic. Currently in private beta, Hypometer is scheduled for a mid-2015 launch, and has been supported by the university's innovation arm, qutbluebox.
For more information on the Hypometer, please contact Katie Prowd and sign up for its official launch on the Hypometer website.
The QUT Social Media Research Group is a collective of more than 30 QUT researchers engaging in cutting-edge social media analytics, usage and platform studies. It involves several professors, associate professors, research fellows and early-career researchers, and has won more than $2 million in competitive grant funding for a variety of world-leading research projects since 2012. For more information, contact Professor Axel Bruns and visit the SMRG website.
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Media contact:
Kate Haggman, QUT Media, 07 3138 038, kate.haggman@qut.edu.au
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