Tracking Canadian Political Discussion on Twitter

Reykjavík.
The final session for the day at ECPR 2011 (well, before we go and hear from the President of Iceland) has a distinct Twitter theme, and starts with Greg Elmer. His focus is on the use of Twitter in the Canadian election debate of 2008, and on the question of how Twitter contributes to intensifying the permanent election campaign.

We may now have moved from news cycles to political information cycles, and the permanent campaign has become an immanent campaign, always focussed on ‘what next?’ This is also a question of methods: how can we engage in live research on such permanent, immanent campaigning? Tools like the IssueCrawler or BlogPulse are useful in this context.

We must also consider the limits of interface time in this: Twitter is not like the recurring new ticker with its loop of news updates, but a non-recurring stream of communications in which more recent posts remove those which came before.

Greg partnered with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to track the leaders’ debate in the 2008 Canadian election, identifying the key moments and tracking whether and how political parties used the platform (within the wider context of the overall media ecology).