New publication on tweeting about TV debates

It’s always great news if a new publication is out – and especially if it goes so quickly as in this case. I submitted this paper for the first time on March, 3. (To those who are not familiar with publication cycles in the scientific world: It would not be too pessimistic to expect it to be published maybe beginning next year). But, I am very happy to announce that it is already out (and thanks to the Social Science Computer Review, the editor and the anonymous reviewers for a really good publication process) :

Trilling, D. (2014) Two different debates? Investigating the relationship between a political debate on TV and simultaneous comments on Twitter. Social Science Computer Review, Advance Online Publication. doi:10.1177/0894439314537886.

What did I do? I had a look at the TV debate (the so-called #tvduell) between the two main candidates during the German Elections 2013, Angela Merkel and Peer Steinbrück, and compared it to how people tweeted about the debate. I found some interesting relationships. As a candidate, mentioning a topic more frequently makes it more likely that you are mentioned together with this topic on Twitter. The only problem: You are mainly associated with negative aspects, or people make fun of you.   Have a look at the article for detailed findings.

How did I do this? I wrote a series of Python scripts (find them here) to process the textual data, count words, find word co-occurences, and produce files for further analysis in other programs.