Twitter is important. Facebook is super-duper important.

Or at least it is important to people working in the popular press. The characterization of Twitter activity in campaigns and elections is haphazard at best. Often, Twitter provides an unlimited reserve of backing for different characerizations of the public mood. The volume of Tweets their interaction or their representativeness is less important than their capacity to prove basically any argument right.

Perhaps most annoying, and telling, is the common journo phrase, “they even coined a hashtag,” used as a marker of the importance of a social moment or movement. Creating a hashtag is a joke. It may be the easiest thing in the world.

Aggregative research, similar to that of Sam Wang or Nate Silver, is not really an option in understanding the flow of information across social networks. To gain access one would need an “internal champion,” and likely a research agenda that would benefit a large social network site. I have neither of these; neither connections nor extensive resources. Using multiple, redundant approaches, I will be mapping social network activity related to the 2016 election and putting regular updates, graphics, and working theories on this site. Resources built as a part of this project will be available for collaboration with other academics and popular press writers. In addition to providing data, I will be building graphics both using traditional design software (Sketch is my go-to drawing program) and d3.js resources.

In short, this page is a hub for information related to empirical analysis of actually existing social network information flows related to the 2016 election.