How to Read this Dashboard
This project attempts to give an overview of the online political landscape in Germany.It is a live dashboard, which collects and analyzes political content from Twitter, Facebook and 40 online news media sources. The dashboard tries to: 1. Locate and present the trending political topics discussed in Germany online. 2. Provide insights on the attitudes and political interests of online partisan users. Each page of the dashboard is platform specific and contains illustrative plots and graphs. For a detailed discussion on the data collection process, on the creation of the plots, and on the limitations of the dashboard’s methodology, read here. Note: The results presented on this dashboard might not replicate the full online interactions.
Top Shared Articles on Facebook
From all the news articles in the database, this table shows the 50 most shared articles on Facebook. The table shows how many times an article was shared and for how long it has been in the top 50. The search bar allows searching for specific news sources or keywords in the URLs. Note: Given data constraints, we only track the Facebook shares for the articles that were published in the last 5 days . This means the maximum number of hours for an article is 120 hours.
Trending Topics
From all the articles, this plot shows the top seven topics media wrote about in the last 24 hours. A topic is a set of content-significant words, as generated by a machine learning algorithm. Each bubble represents a topic. The size of a bubble corresponds to the proportion of the articles referring to a topic. By clicking on a bubble, you can see the eight most significant words for a topic and the relevance of each word per topic. The word in bold for each topic is the most relevant one. For more information about the online media sources we considered and the creation of the plot see here.
Party Attention
This plot shows how many times the collected news articles mentioned the main German political parties’ names in the last 24 hours.
Topics Comparison between Media Sources
Similarly to the trending topics plot, this spider plot shows the top 7 topics in the last 24 hours (Only the top word per topic is presented). It further shows the proportion of articles that media sources create on these topics. We categorize news sources in the database according to their political orientation: left, left-center, center, center-right and right. Each color-shape on the plot corresponds to media sources of a given political orientation and it intersects the lines corresponding to the topics. For one topic, the dots closer to the outer circle tell us that the media sources of that political orientation are proportionally sharing articles related to the topic more often than the media sources of other political orientation. If all dots for one topic are close to the center, all news sources have articles related to it in similar quantities. Note: The topic proportions are not normalized, as there are further topics media talked about.