The First History of the

2008 US Presidential Election Campaign

Karl Grossner

Geography

UC Santa Barbara

Date: Friday, April 4, 2008
Place: Buchanan 1940
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm


Abstract:

I will discuss the two geographic aspects of the Spheres of Influence 2008 project in development so far-a spatiotemporal data model and a text classification measure that enables analysis of geographic variation in issue emphasis by candidates, news outlets and various commentary sources. The two-year long complex social event that is a US Presidential election cycle is modeled using a modified and extended version of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (ISO 21127:2006). That high-level ontology was originally developed for cultural heritage information in digital applications for the domains of museums, libraries and archives. The challenges of representing this ongoing composite event are similar in many respects to those encountered in some historical research, and successful application here is intended as a first step in the development of an ontological framework for geohistorical computing. Separately, we derive a 34-dimension 'issue signature' for each segment of election-related text, and by aggregating across geographic region, candidate, party, time period, etc. expect to show how the subject of the election is far from static.

KARL GROSSNER is a PhD candidate in the Geography Department at UC Santa Barbara. He was the recipient of an NSF IGERT traineeship in Interactive Digital Multimedia in 2005. His current advisor is Professor Michael Goodchild.