An Analysis of Sentiments on Facebook during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
by Saud Alashri, Srinivasa Kandala, Vikash Bajaj, Roopek Ravi, Kendra L. Smith, and Kevin Desouza
Social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook and Twitter, are important spaces for political engagement. SNS have become common elements in political participation, campaigns, and elections. However, little is known about the dynamics between candidate posts and commentator sentiment in response to those posts on SNS. This study enriches computational political science by studying the 2016 U.S. elections and how candidates and commentators engage on Facebook. This paper also examines how online activity might be connected to offline activity and vice versa. We extracted 9,700 Facebook posts by five presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich) from their official Facebook pages and 12,050,595 comments on those posts. We employed topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and trends detection using wavelet transforms to discover topics, trends, and reactions.
Book Chapter: Urban Informatics: Critical Data and Technology Considerations
by Rashmi Krishnamurthy, Kendra L. Smith, and Kevin Desouza
Cities around the world are investing significant resources toward making themselves smarter. In most cases, investments focus on leveraging data through emerging technologies that enable more real-time, automated, predictive, and intelligent decision-making by agents (humans) and objects (devices) within the city. Increasing the connectivity between the various systems and sub-systems of the city through integrative data and information management is also a critical undertaking towards making cities more intelligent. In this chapter, we frame cities as platforms. Specifically, we focus on how data and technology management is critical to the functioning of a city as an agile, adaptable, and scalable platform. The objective of this chapter is to raise your awareness of critical data and technology considerations that still need to be addressed if we are to realize the full potential of urban informatics.