Hourly time series of the number of candidate-related media posted on Instagram during the week before the 2016 US presidential election
One week (Sunday, 2016-10-30 23:00:00 EDT through Sunday, 2016-11-06 23:00:00 EST; 170 hours) of hourly readings of the number of media posted on Instagram, supposedly (according to hashtags with which they were annotated) positive/neutral or in opposition towards candidates Trump and Clinton. The 2016 US presidential election took place on Tuesday, 2016-11-08.
data("USelection2016.Instagram")A data frame of four columns:
| date | : | hour of measurement (in EST5EDT, Eastern Time Zone), | |
format: "%F %T" |
|||
| trump.pos | : | number of media uploads with hashtag suggesting | |
| positive/neutral annotation to Trump | |||
| clinton.pos | : | number of media uploads with hashtag suggesting | |
| positive/neutral annotation to Clinton | |||
| trump.neg | : | number of media uploads with hashtag suggesting | |
| negative annotation to Trump | |||
| clinton.neg | : | number of media uploads with hashtag suggesting | |
| negative annotation to Clinton |
Media posted on Instagram are usually annotated with hashtags. A hashtag can be used to determine whether a candidate-related posting is positive/neutral towards a candidate (for example, #makeamericagreatagain for Trump, #hillary2016 for Clinton) or opposing a candidate (for example, #dumptrump for Trump, #neverhillary for Clinton). In this way, four hourly time series are obtained: Trump vs. Clinton, supporters vs. opponents. For further details, see the reference below. The date column also contains a label EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) or EST (Eastern Standard Time); daylight saving time ended 2016-11-06 at 1:00 a.m. when clocks were moved back to 1:00 a.m. EST. The time stamp "2016-11-06 02:00:00" therefore occurs twice, once with EDT and once with EST.
Hourly readings of the number of media posted on Instagram were collected using Instagram's built-in API.
Schmidbauer H., Roesch A., Stieler F., 2018. The 2016 US presidential election and media on Instagram: Who was in the lead? Computers in Human Behavior 81, 148–160. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.021
data(USelection2016.Instagram)
attach(USelection2016.Instagram)
my.date <- as.POSIXct(date, format = "%F %T", tz = "EST5EDT")
plot(my.date, trump.pos, type = "l", col = 1, lwd = 2,
ylab = "number of media posted on Instagram", ylim = c(0,6e+6),
xlab = "the week before the Election Day (Tuesday, 2016-11-08)")
lines(my.date, clinton.pos, col = 2, lwd = 2)
lines(my.date, trump.neg, col = 3, lwd = 2)
lines(my.date, clinton.neg, col = 4, lwd = 2)
legend("topleft", legend=names(USelection2016.Instagram[-1]),
lty = 1, lwd = 2, col = 1:4)
detach(USelection2016.Instagram)Please choose more modern alternatives, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.