I will speak on a panel on April 13th at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at an event sponsored by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.   The event “Ethics and Elections: Media, Money and Power” will feature “panels, break-out workshops, and debates on the role of political advertising, media “fact checking” on candidate statements, electoral coverage and social media, tracking political donations, and proposals on how to “clean up” the political process.”

A panel from 1:40pm – 2:40 pm on Tweets and Votes: Elections in a Social Media Age will feature panelists Ryan Gallentine, Thomas Keeley, Kathleen Culver and Marc Smith.

I will speak about the results of collecting, analyzing and visualizing the collections of connections that form in political discussions in social media.

For example, this is a map of the connections among the people who recently tweeted about Scott Walker.

The graph represents a network of up to 1000 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained “scott AND walker”. The network was obtained on Friday, 13 April 2012 at 07:40 UTC. There is an edge for each “replies-to” relationship in a tweet. There is an edge for each “mentions” relationship in a tweet. There is a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not a “replies-to” or “mentions”. The earliest tweet in the network was tweeted on Thursday, 12 April 2012 at 03:32 UTC. The latest tweet in the network was tweeted on Friday, 13 April 2012 at 04:12 UTC.
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