Capturing the Scottish Independence Referendum on social media

In the light of the upcoming Scottish Independence Referendum on 18 Sept, 2014, RGU a member of the SocialSensor consortium based in Scotland, has adapted some of its work on trending topics and identification of influencers in social networks for this purpose. 

 

The following links can direct you to the prototype for the Scottish Independence Referendum with some of RGU's recent research where you can try clicking on a trending topic. The default is a 'static' version here:
http://socialsense1.comp.rgu.ac.uk/scottish_independence_frontend/

The animated one is here:
http://socialsense1.comp.rgu.ac.uk/scottish_independence_frontend/animated.html

and there is a 'monitor' version here:
http://socialsense1.comp.rgu.ac.uk/scottish_independence_frontend/monitor.html (best viewed with Google Chrome)

This last one is designed to be used without interaction, so it immediately picks a random story and shows the tweets/images from it. Users can still click on the links, but they don't have to. The links demonstrate RGU's research in identifying trending topics in real-time within social media, considering newshounds and influencers, incorporating context awareness and adapting to particular areas of interests or domains. In developing information systems, RGU follows a user-centred evaluation particularly considering the relevance of content.

The team expertise in this initiative:

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 Dr. Carlos Martin Dancausa - trending topics and social media, probabilistic models

Dr. David Corney - newshounds, machine learning, data analysis, benchmarking

Dr. Michael Heron - graphical user interface and integration

Dr. Malcolm Clark - evaluation of content use and interfaces

Prof. Ayse Goker - Team leader

This work builds on on-going results from the EU Socialsensor project.