When SurveyPost launched two years ago, our community of researchers had just begun to investigate developments in digital technology, social media, and big data and their impact on the future of survey research. In order to engage other survey researchers and establish a body of knowledge about this rapidly changing […] Read more »
Groups Mobilize to Aid Democrats in ’14 Data Arms Race
Liberal and Democratic-leaning groups, facing a difficult midterm election next year without the technological muscle of the Obama campaign behind them, are preparing a major effort to improve their data infrastructure. … The initiative, as yet unnamed, will be based at Catalist, a for-profit cooperative founded in 2006 by Harold […] Read more »
To understand the emotive part of voters’ decisions, you need numbers
At the end of The Washington Post’s review of the book “Double Down” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Peter Hamby fires a shot across the bow of the “Nate Silver wing of the Internet” …. For Hamby, the fact that voters care about “the human side of these strange and wily […] Read more »
The Information-Gathering Paradox
… The Internet industry, having nudged consumers to share heaps of information about themselves, has built a trove of personal data for government agencies to mine — erecting, perhaps unintentionally, what Alessandro Acquisti, a Carnegie Mellon University behavioral economist, calls “the de facto infrastructure of surveillance.” Nearly five months after […] Read more »
The Reselling of the President
Richard Wolffe’s account of the 2012 election [“The Message: The Reselling of President Obama”] is a fine behind-the-scenes campaign-trail book that makes me wonder about the future of behind-the-scenes campaign-trail books. … Yet “The Message” is actually most interesting when Wolffe descends from the executive suite to the “boiler room,” […] Read more »
Nielsen to Measure Twitter Chatter About TV Shows
… Nielsen is now measuring what it calls the “unique audience” for Twitter posts about television, providing a more complete view of the phenomenon known as social TV. On Monday the company is introducing Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, a product announced last year that professes to measure all the activity […] Read more »