Political campaigns are a chance for the country to reflect on who we are and where we are going as a society. They also allow us to examine our leaders and reflect on who we want to continue carrying our nation forward. Political candidates clash over competing visions and demonstrate their qualities of leadership. In a healthy democracy, the public is paying close attention to what potential future presidents will be like. However, with the growing media available to political candidates, it is now difficult to get a clear picture of what candidates stand for. Balancing debates, public events and speeches, social media, and news coverage, voters find themselves unable to keep up. Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Associate Professor at Syracuse University, believes sorting through the data within social media will help make elections more transparent by aiding voters in selecting the best candidates to lead the country. Her current project will help journalists to cover the political campaign, and will help citizens keep track of what candidates are saying about themselves and each other.

Working with a diverse group of experts in fields ranging from data visualization, to social media collection, to natural language processing as well as a small team of doctoral students and masters students who assist with the research, Dr. Stromer-Galley is helping to advance both computational approaches to study political campaigns and more comprehensive examinations of political campaigns beyond just their speeches and TV ads. More broadly, Dr. Stromer-Galley’s research is helping to understand how ordinary people and elites are using digital communication technologies, from chat rooms to Facebook to websites, for political purposes and to what effects.

Current research includes:

• Navigating Presidential Campaigns: By collecting and building a platform to automatically analyze all Twitter and Facebook messages campaigns produce, as well as what citizens are saying about the election, Dr. Stromer-Galley hopes to aid citizens in understanding the agendas of each candidate. Using an unbiased approach, she and her team make the information more easy to access without weighing in with their own beliefs.

• A Toolkit for Journalists: Journalism has become a challenging profession in light of the shear magnitude of data there is to sort through and the many outlets used to share it. Dr. Stromer-Galley’s website will provide ongoing, real-time analysis as well as more focused periodic examinations around key elements, like debates. In so doing, she will assist journalists while they seek out the most accurate and transparent information.

• Measuring the Public’s Attitudes: Additionally, Dr. Stromer-Galley hopes to survey some of the people who are tweeting about the election to make sense of their values and political activities. Therefore, her research can help to connect public attitudes as the presidential election moves towards Election Day.