Groundviews

Archives of General Election 2015: #SLGE15 & #GenElecSL

Groundviews

Over eight weeks, Groundviews archived every single tweet tagged with either #SLGE15 or #GenElecSL. Once a week throughout the campaign period, these archives were released over Twitter for anyone to browse through or download.

Sentiments, positions, promises and statements expressed over Twitter, an ephemeral medium, become extremely difficult to index and search for as time goes by. Content on Twitter, including linked images, web content and audio are an important historical record of elections in helping provide context. From candidates to voters, from those in Sri Lanka to commentators in the diaspora and beyond, from the official accounts of leading political parties to the President of Sri Lanka, these eight weeks saw well over 174,633 tweets generated over both hashtags (126,099 of which were #GenElecSL), making it even in comparison to January’s Presidential Election the most tweeted election in our history.

On the morning of the 18th, as the official results were trickling in, both hashtags generated unprecedented volumes of traffic. #SLGE15 at around 7.30am was peaking at around 9 tweets a minute.

#GenElecSL at around 24 tweets a minute.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s written a very good analysis of both Twitter and Facebook during the Presidential Elections. As he too notes, it would be interesting for someone to do semantic analysis, geo-spatial distribution over time, link analysis and other influence metrics on this Twitter data.

#GenElecSL

#SLGE15

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