Class Exercise 1 - Analysis of Singapore General Elections 2011 tracker

For our first class exercise, we were asked to analyze the Singapore General Elections 2011 tracker at http://ge.swarm.is/

In summary, the tracker is a visualization project that aims to reflect the true national agenda set by the social nature of online discussions and trends. Data from news articles, blog posts and Twitter was used to identify the top mentioned keywords and the most shared content during the Singapore General Elections 2011.

After analyzing the visualization with the class, here are some of the pros and cons that I thought of after our discussion in class.

Pros
1. The tracker acknowledges the rise and importance of social media as data was not just taken from mainstream media, but blog posts and Twitter as well. Incorporating information from social media is increasingly becoming important as views from such sources are more reflective of the general public.

2. The visualization enables us to track the common key terms used and where these key terms are found simply by clicking on the key term that the user wants to focus on. E.g. By clicking on the key term "vote", the word is linked to its source with coloured lines on the right (pink and blue lines)as shown in the image below.



 3. Users can track the day-to-day history of key terms (when they are introduced, discarded throughout the election process). E.g. from the image above, we can observed from the red line on the left that the frequency of key term "vote" has been increasing since 29 April to 3rd May.

4. In addition, the tracker includes numbers beside each key term to indicate their exact change in ranks from 2nd May to 3rd May. For key terms that only appears on 3rd May, asterisks are used instead of numbers. As seen from the image below, colours of the numbers are also used to emphasized the changes, whereby green font represents an increase in rank while red fonts represents a decrease in rank. As such, users can easily observe the trends of each key term at a glance.

Cons
1.  Certain areas of the visualization can be confusing

• Colours of the bar highlighting the key terms. I have yet to figure out what those colours represent
• The function of the tab "Running"    

In all, the visualization succeeds in demonstrating the trend of particular topics among the general public. However, a more detailed explanation of the various functions would be useful. Also, it would be beneficial if users are allowed to click on more than 1 key term to focus and compare the selected key terms.