Enter the Electome.

Fueling the horse race of ideas in the 2016 election

Here at the Laboratory for Social Machines, within the the MIT Media Lab, we believe technology can help offer an alternative to the horse-race journalism that has dominated election news for the last half-century. The Electome surfaced and tracked 2016 U.S. election issues the public cares about, or what we call “The Horse Race of Ideas.” Drawing from areas of computer science including machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis, we explored how three separate forces—the campaign journalism, the messaging of the candidates, and the public’s response in the digital sphere—converged to shape the presidential election’s most important narratives as well as its outcome. We provided analytics to drive election coverage by leading newsrooms such as The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fusion, and Vice News. The Electome also proudly partnered with the Commission for Presidential Debates to provide analytics briefs to the moderators of all the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Thanks to data partnerships with Twitter and the Roper Center at Cornell University, our lab accessed the entire database of tweets, with hundreds of millions of new ones added each day, the social graph of Twitter, and election-related polls for our key analyses.

Electome articles

Electome humans

Research assistant

Sophie Chou

Masters student

Eric Chu

Graduate researcher

Lisa Conn

Masters student

Nabeel Gillani

Visiting researcher

Andrew Heyward

Program Manager

Uzra Khan

Research software architect

Mike Koehrsen

PhD Student

Neo Mohsenvand

Data Journalist

Shawn Musgrave

Research Software Engineer

Eric Pennington

Research Scientist

William Powers

Director

Deb Roy

Masters Student

Raphael Schaad

Deployment Lead

Russell Stevens

PhD Student

Prashanth Vijayarghavan

Postdoctoral Associate

Soroush Vosoughi

Data journalist and news application developer

John West

Masters Student

Ann Yuan

Project Manager

Eugene yi