Nov 18, 2016 | News, OII, TWC, WSI, WSTNet Lab
For the 2016 US Presidential election, researchers at the University of Southampton with support from the EPSRC funded project SOCIAM, built a real-time data visualization that combined traditional polling data with social media posts. The application was built and designed for the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute EMPAC Campfire, a novel multi-user, collaborative, immersive, computing interface that consist of a desk height panoramic screen and floor projection that users gather around and look into. The application is also a part of the Web Macroscope (a visualization platform developed at the University of Southampton) and uses data from the Southampton Web Observatory.
Data collection for the polling data was taking from the
Huffington Post Pollster API, which collects all the popular polls and their results. The social media data was collected on Twitter, using both their Streaming and Search API. The Streaming API was used to create a stream of data that included 1% of all tweets that had any of the popular and official hashtags and words used by each campaign to show support for their candidate. This hashtag list included tags like ‘TeamTrump’, ‘maga’, ‘TeamTrump’, and ’draintheswamp’ in support for Donald Trump, and ‘LoveTrumpsHate’, ‘ImWithHer’, ‘StrongerTogether’, and ‘WhyIWantHillary’ in support for Hillary Clinton. Any tweets that mixed hashtags and words from both candidates were removed as this was normally done in a way to not show support for a candidate, but to react to supporters on the other side.
Results from the visualizations showed different levels of support on Twitter for each candidates over time. In the days leading to the election on November 8th, tweets in support for Trump were 1.5 times greater than those in support for Clinton. Interestingly, on the day of the election, this ratio switched and levelled off. Around the 2pm EST on November 8th, tweets in support for Clinton were almost equal to the number of tweets supporting Trump. Later in the night of the election, the ratio of support changed again, with tweets in support of Trump being 1.14 times larger than those in support for Clinton.
Another interesting result from the data, was the how many tweets that had geographic information tagged to them were overwhelmingly in support for Clinton throughout the day leading and on the election. Most tweets streamed through the visualization had no GPS lat/long data embedded in them (these tweets often come from mobile phones using the Twitter App, with the optional GSP location data option enabled). As a whole, these geographic tweets are a small minority of the data collected from the Twitter Stream (about 1%). Interestingly, these geographic tweets supported Clinton 15 times more than Trump. Why this is the case is hard to say. It looks like Clinton supporters use mobile apps with location data more than Trump supporters.
May 25, 2016 | ANN, B-IT, Conference, CSAIL, DSI, FOKUS, HDL, L3S, News, NEXT, NI, OII, SONIC, TWC, UC-CS, WEST, WSI, WSTNet Lab
WSTNet Lab Directors Meeting, Hannover, 22 May 2016
WSTNet Lab Directors got together at the start of the Web Science Conference this week in Hannover, Germany. Highlights of the meeting include the election of Steffen Staab as Chair and Pete Burnap as Vice-Chair, planning for this years’ Web Science Summer School at University of Koblenz (30 June to 6 July – #wwsss16), and firming up of arrangements for World Wide Web Week – a global event celebrating 10 years of Web Science to be held later this year.
Who’s who in the photo (from left to right): Thanassis Tiropanis (WSI), Manfred Hauswirth (FOKUS), Steffan Staab (Institute WeST), Noshir Contractor (SONIC), Sung-Hyon Myaeng (KAIST), Les Carr (WSI), John Erickson (RPI), Susan Davies (WST), Hans Akkermans (VU Amsterdam), Dave De Roure (Oxford e-Research), Anni Rowland-Campbell (Intersticia), Pete Burnap (Cardiff University), and Wolfgang Nejdl, (L3S).
Apr 14, 2015 | Media, Video, WSI, WST Trustees and Fellows, WSTNet Lab
Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Southampton University, believes in the power of open data. With Sir Tim Berners-Lee he persuaded two UK Prime Ministers of the importance of letting us all get our hands on information that’s been collected about us by the government and other organisations. But, this has brought him into conflict with people who think there’s money to be made from this data. And open data raises issues of privacy.
Nigel Shadbolt talks to Jim al-Khalili about how a degree in psychology and philosophy lead to a career researching artificial intelligence and a passion for open data.
Mar 27, 2015 | Events, Video, WSI, WSTNet Lab
Dr Phil Tetlow from IBM gave this months distinguished lecture to mark the start of his visiting professor term.
If you browser does not support embedded video Click here to view his talk
Jul 21, 2014 | Events, WSI, WSTNet Lab
The University of Southampton is hosting the W3S Web Science summer school from the 20th to the 26th of July. The course is aimed at Masters and PhD students studying Web Science or a related discipline who wish to learn more about the tools and methods required to manage and process the increasingly large and complex data from the web.
Over the week there will be talks from several keynote speakers including:
- Prof. James Hendler is the Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications
- Cory Efram Doctorow
- Chris Welty
- Prof. Guus Schreiber
For more information including details on how to apply can be found online here.
To see the full programme and keynote speakers, click here.
Jun 13, 2014 | Events, WSI, WSTNet Lab
The University of Southampton celebrated 10 years of Web Science at a vibrant event at the Royal Society in London yesterday to officially launch the new Web Science Institute (WSI) which brings together the activities of the Web Science Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT), the Southampton/Fraunhofer joint venture (SoFWired), co-operations with other Web Science research groups via the Web Science Trust (WST) as well as more easily integrating interdisciplinary research from departments across the university.
Institute Directors Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Professor Susan Halford, together with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, were joined by other leading figures from Web and internet science, including the University’s newly appointed Visiting Professor Liam Maxwell, Government Chief Technology Officer, in a panel-led discussion on future developments. JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com and Richard Susskind OBE, author, speaker and IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales also generously gave of their time to deliver keynote presentations that were both entertaining and insightful.
We are indebted to Alex Hovden for LiveBlog‘ing the event
The event also featured a Web Science Exhibition showcasing the Southampton Doctoral students’ research, SoFWIReD developments, the Web Observatory and the SOCIAM project, which examines the theory and practice of social machines in partnership with the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh. SOCIAM features use of a Web Observatory as an academic instrument to study the mechanisms and dynamics of social machines and is cast as “a social machine for studying social machines”. The Exhibition included stands from the Open Data Institute, the Web Foundation and NOW Publishers.
