Congressional Primaries 2012, a project operated by the Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern, won an award recently from the Online News Association, the world’s largest group of online journalists.
The project developed technology to help Illinois news organizations cover the state’s congressional primaries. Sixteen news organizations, including the Chicago Sun-Times, NBC5 Chicago and Evanston Now, supplemented their election coverage with the lab’s tools. Congressional Primaries 2012 also features profiles of each Illinois congressional primary candidate using social media.
“We want to make our user experience straightforward, so different users can obtain the information they need in a quick time,” said Medill Prof. Jeremy Gilbert, who led the design phase of the project. “The biggest challenge for us is how to analyze and interpret the substantial data collected.”
Congressional Primaries 2012 includes information gathered through social media and automated aggregations, as well as campaign finance data.
“To achieve these, we have tailored a set of tools for the project, including an analysis and categorization of candidates’ tweets and the tweets of candidates’ followers, an aggregation tool that collected coverage of individual congressional primary races from multiple sources and a snapshot of campaign contributions by geography,” said Ryan Graff, the communications manager of the lab.
Third-year McCormick graduate student Shawn O’Banion works on the project team, which formed in December and launched Congressional Primaries 2012 in March.
“My role mainly focuses on categorizing political communication on social media,” O’Banion said. “I built a tool that automatically analyzes what people are talking about on Twitter, as organized by their typical news categories — sports, health, technology, et cetera.”
The project was developed on the basis of both the research topics of several graduate students and the course JOUR 390: Innovation in Journalism & Technology, taught by Jeremy Gilbert in Fall Quarter 2011, where students from Medill and McCormick worked in groups to do projects.
The Knight News Innovation Lab, a joint initiative of Medill and McCormick, was created in 2011 with a $4.2 million grant.
