Electome, analytics tool for the presidential campaign, Laboratory for Social Machines, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines, is amidst an analytics project focused on the Presidential election called “The Electome.” Drawing machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis, they’re exploring how three separate forces – campaign journalism, the candidates' messaging, and the public response in the digital sphere — converge to shape the presidential election’s most important narratives as well as its outcome. They’ll close out our 2016 mediaFWD by sharing what they’ve learned and setting the stage for a historical moment in time.

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Built at the Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM) with support from Twitter and Knight Foundation, The Electome is a data project aimed at improving journalism and electoral politics in the social-media age. During the 2016 US presidential election, The Electome used machine learning, network science, and other artificial-intelligence techniques to track the public response to the campaign, with a focus on policy issues. Dozens of stories were published with news organizations including The Washington Post, CNN, and Vice. The Electome was also an official partner of the Commission on Presidential Debates, providing data and suggested questions to the moderators. One of its analytic tools was the focus of an exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. LSM is the only science lab in the world with access to Twitter’s full output of approximately 500 million tweets per day.

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