Election Buzz
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General Information Team members - Ligia Aguilhar, Michael Gofron, Lori Janjigian and Bruno Peynetti What it does - Election Buzz’s purpose is to provide insight into the presidential candidates and their followers on Twitter. This tool is helpful in that during election season the amount of tweets being generated by and about candidates is too many to keep up with. This project can be used by voters, journalists, campaign managers, etc to get an idea of what candidates are talking about. By making use of Twitter, we will collect information, buzzwords, hashtags, etc. from each candidate and will display the results in a clear way. As a group, we also discussed different directions that we can take this project. We could highlight and filter out results by candidate, geography, time, and particular topics. In addition, we can possibly show if the reaction to a certain topic was mostly positive or negative. We can possibly also make a, “Who is xxxx according to Twitter,” page which generates a profile of each candidate based on their tweets and those of their followers. And finally, we discussed creating a graph showing how much candidates mention each other.
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Project setup information Resource dependencies (databases, external services, APIs, etc.) - mySQL, Twitter API Code/library dependencies - d3, react, node-modules. How to setup and run the code - run a server in the home directory. To run a server in the home directory, navigate to the home directory in terminal and type "python -m SimpleHTTPServer". Navigate to the port on localhost indicated by output.
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How it works - We stream data from twitter storing it in a database. With the data we streamed we create word clouds, analyze key topics, and find the important election topics for you.
Key technologies - D3, Javascript, Python, SQL, React, Twitter API
Next steps - Add social media sharing buttons and improve word clouds. We would like to extend this project to be used relatively easily for future elections and elections in other countries. This way it can be used as a tool for any election anywhere, anytime.