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PL SC 468: Politics and the Media

Resources for PL SC 468, Politics and the Media

Pennsylvania Perspectives on the 2016 Election

This web and social media archive documents the diversity of Pennsylvania perspectives around the 2016 U.S. election. The collection includes the dedicated election sections of Pennsylvania news outlet websites, campaign websites and social media communications of Pennsylvania based candidates for state and federal political offices, websites and social media from statewide political advocacy groups and the perspectives of university student organizations found on Facebook. 
 
A full collection description, including inventory of websites and social media accounts archived, can be found online at:
Websites

Websites were captured by the Special Collections Library using the Internet Archive's Archive-It service. Archived websites are accessible online at: 

Tweets

Twitter data was captured from Twitter's Application Programming Interface (API) using Python scripts. Complete Twitter data in raw JSON format is only available to Penn State University staff and faculty, in accordance with Twitter's API Terms of Service. A full inventory of tweet IDs are available online at:

Overview of the PA based tweets collected: 

  • 365456 tweets
  • 161751 (44.26%) have hashtags
  • 187703 (51.36%) have embedded URLs
  • 73637 (20.15%) have embedded images
  • 134063 (36.68%) are retweets
  • Top user = PAGOP (6659)
  • Top hashtag = pasen (21303)

Graph depicting the number of tweets by day for the selected PA accounts and hashtags:

Other Web Archiving Resources

Following are additional web and social media archive resources, including some specific to politics and elections, especially the 2016 U.S. election.