Measuring Responsiveness in the Online Public Sphere for the 2016 U.S. Election: Concepts

Abstract: The election narrative is formed under the competitions of ideas among critical players involving politicians, news media, public influentials, and the general public. Untangling the complex process of narrative formation, however, is no easy task due to implicit influences among the key players. This paper outlines a conceptual framework to untangle this complex process. We propose the problem of measuring "responsiveness" that quantifies a player's influence on another given a specific election topic over time. In particular, we make use of multivariate Hawkes Process to infer the influence network between pairs of election players. We demonstrate an early version system of analytic pipeline of online public sphere discussions from data ingestion, influence inference, to visualization. The paper concludes by showcasing some preliminary results based on Twitter and news media election-related contents from July to October 2015 and discussing plans for future research.