Blake Lytle, GIS Specialist,
Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies
The Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies (CCGT) has created an interactive site for exploring geography as a factor in the 2016 presidential election. The multi-faceted site offers new and innovate ways of visualizing factors which may important to the presidential campaigns, such as social media posts about each candidate, where campaign travel stops occurred, and the locations of candidate’s field offices. The live-streaming maps can be used to gain insight into how these factors may be influenced by geographic variables, such as the number of electoral votes in each state, the locations of swing states, and where each party has the strongest base. Looking at the spatial intersection of these variables offers new perspectives on campaign management and geographic strategy of each candidate.
The election provided the perfect opportunity for CCGT to explore state-of-the-art technologies that allow them to collect and manage live streaming of spatio-temporal data, such as the stream of geo-located tweets about the candidate using advanced GIS server technology. This technology, called ArcGIS GeoEvent, can be used to connect to virtually any type of geo-tagged data, such as sensor measurements, GPS devices, RSS feeds, and social media providers. Tweets are added to the server using a spatiotemporal big data store service which is a scalable, high velocity write throughput way to record observational data. The result is that users can compare the distribution of geo-located tweets about each candidate in side-by-side maps as well as geographic clusters to easily identify any patterns in the spatial distribution of tweets around the globe.
You can visit the interactive site directly at www.bit.ly/uspreselection2016
