Project proposal

Geo-spatial Visualization of Social Activities (Twitter): An Approach towards Smart Electoral Campaigns 

 Aroosa Younas, Hammad Ahmad, Junaid Abdul Jabbar 

Election is an important occasion for political parties as well as general public. A significant phase in the preparations for elections is of electoral campaigns, where the potential candidate would arrange public speeches in different areas to increase his number of voters. These campaigns have much influence towards the voter’s decision making, (Iyengar and Simon 2000). An intelligent way to plan this campaign would be to filter out the geographic areas of high and low popularity, so that the campaign resources (e.g. time, money) are used effectively to the maximum advantage.

The improvements and increased use of social platforms e.g. twitter has allowed people to express support for their favorite political person, hence the analysis of this data can provide us with the popularity statistics. These results when presented in the form of reports may help in general understanding and ranking of different candidates but questions comes on how to incorporate these results for the identification of campaign sites. Here comes the Geographical Information System (GIS) which allows the Geo-spatial visualization of data extracted from social platforms like twitter. In a similar study of US, (Tsou et al. 2013) have used APIs (application programming interfaces) to extract the data from social sites using keywords like "Obama" and mapped it to study the popularity or attention levels of different candidates.

This project is directed towards studying the usefulness of GIS for smart electoral campaigns. Our hypothesis states that "GIS will improve the overall campaign process". We will use GIS for identification of potential campaign sites on the basis of spatial popularity hotspots and analyze the results to study how incorporation of GIS has effected the whole process.

References

Iyengar, Shanto and Adam F Simon (2000). “New perspectives and evidence on political communication and campaign effects”. In: Annual review of psychology 51.1, pp. 149–169.

Tsou, Ming-Hsiang et al. (2013). “Mapping social activities and concepts with social media (Twitter) and web search engines (Yahoo and Bing): a case study in 2012 US Presidential Election”. In: Cartography and Geographic
Information Science 40.4, pp. 337–348.