How do political parties influence you? And how does Chris Cochrane figure that out?

September 4, 2012

Article by Paul Fraumeni, published in U of T News

When U.S. President Barack Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage on May 9 of this year, the Twitterverse went into overdrive. Social media analysts reported that Twitter saw 1.6 million #gaymarriage tweets immediately after Obama’s announcement. The pace peaked at 7,347 tweets per minute that afternoon.

That’s a lot of talk about an issue that could well have a tangible impact on the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign.

But how do political scientists like U of T Scarborough professor Chris Cochrane make sense of the actual messages being articulated in this wave of opinion?

Welcome to political analysis in the age of big data.

“Computing has changed the nature of research in any discipline and it’s making a huge impact on how we keep track of what’s going on in politics,” says Cochrane, who specializes in the left-right divide and how that plays out with issues such as abortion, capital punishment and same-sex marriage.

Continue reading this article online at U of T News.