MURFREESBORO — MTSU
media students took a crash course in studying public opinion during Monday
night’s 2016 presidential debate, using social media to gauge citizens’
reactions to the first official Clinton-Trump verbal clash.
Guided by School of Journalism professor Ken Blake,
director of the MTSU Office of Communication Research and the MTSU Poll,
students plugged the #debates and #debate2016 Twitter hashtags into a
special online tracking program Sept. 26 to compile data into spreadsheets.
They wanted to see who was saying what, and where, to whom about the candidates
and their comments.
“The whole universe of Twitter isn’t the whole universe of voters,” Blake
cautioned the students in the Bragg Media and Entertainment Building
laboratory. “This is a news event for those who ‘showed up’ for those
particular hashtags.”
Gathering such details in real time can translate
into strong fact-based news stories, campaign-dependent political polling
information and even down-to-the-minute timing for audience-focused news
outlets’ social-media feeds.
“We’ve only had in-class examples before now, “
said media and communication graduate student Troy Dixon of Nashville, “and a
lot of times that’s been real data, but this is the first time we’ve tried it
live.
“We’re trying to discern patterns, to see what
moments in the debate generate conversation and what that conversation was, to
get a feel for public opinion.”
School of Journalism lecturer Dan Eschenfelder, a former TV news director,
told the students that a former colleague’s full-time job used the same sort of
data they were studying.
“He studied all the
information like this and sent out blasts throughout the company,” Eschenfelder
said. “He could analyze it and tell each individual (news) station their
pinpoint perfect times to post something or tweet it because of that data.”
Unfortunately, despite
Blake and his students’ detailed research and preparation, the website they
used wasn’t quite up to the task it touted and lacked the real-time tweeting
information their project needed. They tried a desktop version of the program
and it responded better, Blake said.
“This was kind of a warm-up
for the next debate,” an enthusiastic Blake said, more than an hour after the
event ended and students were beginning to leave the lab. “We’ll be trying to
come up with a more reliable system for gathering our information … and get a
process we can rely on for our live election night coverage (on MT10 News).
“The availability of good
data related to public affairs on the web has really exploded in the last five
years,” he continued, recalling his own recent analysis of severe structural
issues with nearly two dozen Rutherford County bridges thanks to extensive
Federal Highway Administration reports.
“Journalists who know how
to use these techniques and analyze this data really have an edge. It’s also
the kind of journalism our system needs right now. It’s very difficult to know
what the facts are; everybody’s got their different takes on the facts, and
data analysis can offer clear-eyed, clear-headed indications of what really is
true.”
“The aspect I’m most
interested in is determining what shapes public opinion and finding ways to
measure it,” Hixson added. “It’s not like you can pick up some magic indicator
that shows you what public opinion is. Being able to analyze social media in
that way is very helpful.”
The experiment will
continue through the presidential and vice presidential debates onto election
night Nov. 8. You can learn more about the project at http://drkblake.com/analyzingtwitter.
You can see how data
journalism lays the foundation for news stories by reading Blake’s bridge
safety report, complete with interactive map, at http://thedatareporter.com/rutherfords-bad-bridges-2015.
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