Thursday 2 April 2015

The Political Futures Tracker

I usually avoid politics, I certainly don't tend to air my political thoughts in public. Of course if you live in the UK then you can't really avoid politics at the moment as we now have just a month to go before the election. Not only will I be bombarded with leaflets and adverts but even my work is political at the moment. We've been working with Nesta to develop the Political Futures Tracker which "tells us the top political themes, how positive or negative people feel about them, and how far parties and politicians are looking to the future". I've been spending a lot of time on this recently writing code, analysing data, and producing nice visualizations.

Most of the work has been looking at how politicians use Twitter, but we are also analyzing the party manifestos as they become available. So if you want some (hopefully) unbiased analysis have a look at the six blog posts we've published so far and keep an eye out for some live analysis this evening (George's tweets are probably the best live source).