In addition to an ever deafening volume of print, radio and television election coverage that the web has its own share of sites dedicated to following election-related data of all kinds. Sites like Andrew S. Tanenbaum‘s Electoral-Vote.com have been a strong web presence during key election seasons since 2004. Tanenbaum, a well-known and published American computer scientist at Vrije Universiteit, generates a US map of detailed polling data and predictions based on an algorithm he created.
Rolling your mouse pointer over a given state also reveals each state’s voting history in recent elections. Tanenbaum’s site is useful, not only for the wealth of information, data and visualizations he provides, but also for his willingness to explain how he arrived at the data. He even provides a data feed and downloadable data sheet of his data for others to use and analyze. Perhaps sites such as this inspired others, like vineet_sc, the individual behind Perspctv.com.
Perspctv claims to provide “an exploration of internet activity in reference to mainstream media“. Under the ‘Credits‘ page for the site, the site’s creator details the sources the site ‘pulls’ from to create its news ‘streams’ and visualizations. Not unexpectedly, CNN and Electoral-Vote.com polling data get used, but things go truly ‘meta’ when this data gets placed side-by-side with aggregated ‘news mentions’, recent Google search data, an ongoing analysis of the ‘blogosphere’, and even an analysis and feed displaying recent mentions in the micro-blogging tool Twitter. This provides a strong example of the power and state of web tools in 2008: we can now ‘pull’ data feeds from several syndicated sources – be they traditional news sources, trusted research sites, or even more esoteric sources like micro-blogs and personal opinion journals, and rather adequately visualize, juxtapose and re-contextualize them to suit our goals.
Of course, like many Web2.0 tools, you can also ‘share’ data from Perspctv by embedding visualizations from the site directly into your own – as I’ve done here below (note: like YouTube videos, this requires Flash to work).
Finally, the traditional news media has also been quite adept at taking some of these new approaches and technologies and putting them to similar use. Two strong examples that come to mind are C-Span’s ‘Debate Hub’ and the New York Times’ debate video/transcript viewer tool (pictured in the screenshot below), which also includes a nifty fact-checking commentary tab saving us all a bit of time as we trudge through the various claims and rebuttals in these debates.
C-Span’s Debate Hub features several tools for analyzing the debates – including an interactive timeline, video clips, and even a treemap visualization. Another interesting addition, especially in light of Perspctv, is C-Span’s decision to also include what they call ‘Twitter coverage’ and ‘Blog coverage’ (see screenshot below). Also note, that while the screenshot below shows that ‘Blog coverage’ is currently featuring the Chicago Tribune (ie: coverage from blogs attached to traditional print news publishers), C-Span does include a pretty wide variety of blogs feeding their ‘coverage’ section.
Of course, it wouldn’t be C-Span if they didn’t give you an option to actually watch the debate, as well – which you can do right from their webpage.
Happy debating…
Another interesting visualization of election-related information can be found at RealClearPolitics.com. The site collates results from multiple polls, and also offers averages of those polls over time. If you look at Ohio, for example, you can see a graph of the polls over time, and use the slider to see where things stood on a particular date. E.g.:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/oh/ohio_mccain_vs_obama-400.html