User Monitoring of the US elections 2016 (UMUSE)

Measuring online demand for candidates and topics of the Presidential Elections on the Web

The UMUSE-project aims to hit new ground for monitoring Users interest during eleven months (1st of January to 8th of November 2016) of Presidential Election campaigns in the United States. It has started to analyse by computer based content analysis the users search behaviour on various search engines and social networks. It also follows the public discussions in the US-Media. The UMUSE-project is systematically monitoring and collecting search patterns online for the US, UK, Canada and also worldwide. The project is based on preliminary analysis of former Presidential election campaigns going back to 2004 and 2008 elections. The project will show how issues and candidates evolve on time with regards of monitored Users interest and with respect to the media coverage. And it would like to emphasize the online user-perspective of the election campaign in addition to other, measurements and pollings. It is based on an independent, neutral, international scientific cooperation between University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Northwestern University (USA) in Boston, and IFAAR Institute in Berne (Switzerland).