Project idea
History 3460: Digital History
Group Name: Instigator
Group members: Robert Sorenson, Jordan Smith, Felipe Francois
Archiving History Digitally
There are a few questions that our group, Instigators, seeks to find answers to on the current presidential election. How much influence do the debates between candidates affect and change the outcome of the polls coming closer to the election? How much influence do the debates affect who actually wins the elections? Have any previous elections been decided solely on debate performance?
Although we have considered the actual debates as a guide for our research questions we don’t actually know the scope to which we should go about answering our questions. Some of the outlets we are considering for our debate feedback are CNN (they display a meter for a cohort of undecided voters during the live debates to depict their feelings toward what each candidate is saying), Gallop, Fox, and the New York Times as well as other online sources.
Some obvious challenges we anticipate are with respect to collecting data. Such as getting access to recordings, transcripts and poll data of the debates. Choosing a single method of collaboration could also be a tough decision because it will be a basis for understanding what we each gather. Another problem is how to put the information together so it makes sense and reflects the actual debate. Lastly, keeping our own biases at bay so that we represent the facts as they appear.
Although I really like you idea, have you considered anything else during your brainstorming session?
Hi Anton. In short yes we’ve considered other ideas during our brainstorming session. However, we have decided to delve into the idea of the debates and its impact on the elections. We think its an important question to be answered; because if it is the case that performing well in the debates could be a candidates’ ticket to the presidency, then candidates might want to direct more of their resources towards debates given our project findings. This obviously is all theoretical and there would be much more factors that we would need to consider.
I like the idea of integrating the debates into your project. Your group name is pretty origninal as well.
Thanks Phillip. We certainly want to be instigating the necessary questions that might help answer the intriguing process of electing a United States president.
I like this idea as it seems that the polls are always showing something new even though the numbers either dont change at all or are always changing. Is your topic solely on polling, or on other aspects of “predicting the election” as well?
Hey Caroline very interesting question. We were hoping to keep everything else equal, which you might know is almost impossible to do in the presidential elections. Our main goal is to see if the infamous debate affect the election so much so that someone could actually win the election base on their performance on the debate. The segment of our project that is most daunting is ruling out the other potential causes in order to gage the real impact of the debates on the winner.
This:
is great. It shows us that you’re thinking in complex ways about causation and shows that you understand that it will be a challenge establishing the impact of the debates. We will spend a lot of time helping you guys think this through.
Do you think that “instigating” could be viewed as a “good” thing?
Hey Eliezer I can’t seem to get my head around your question. however, I’m going out on a limb to try to answer your concern. Just so we are on the same page the definition of instigating- means to bring about or initiate an action or event. The thesaurus say “To Set In Motion, get underway, get off the ground, start, commence and so on… Maybe you have heard the word used in a negative sense, which I understand but like many other words that we may used negatively, intrinsically some of them aren’t derived from negative beginnings or meanings. On the flip side to your question, we really don’t want to take ourselves too seriously, not that we aren’t apathetic towards our topic or project.
I was referring to “negative” instigating leading to positive things.
Interesting questions. To add to your topic, did you consider the VP candidate debate into the outcome of the election?
Hey Guang we do believe that the vice presidential debate is directly correlated with the process we seek to research. On that note, we will certainly be including those debates as well.
There is a lot of information that support your questions available however I wonder how you can make this interesting. Most of it seems like it is going to come down to polling and graphs supported by a bunch of data.
It would be great to see if team Instigator can pull this off with a unique approach. Hope it doesn’t get stale. Good luck, have fun!
Stephen, Everything that is done digitally comes down to “a bunch of data”. Particularly with this digital history class where our final project will be done and accessed digitally. Remember data collected, sorted, and presented in a sensible manner could be used to do countless number of things to improve history, business, and many other aspects of society.
Most tech companies are valued in billions of dallas on the basis of data, and sometimes that data hasn’t even been properly sorted as of the valuation. Not everyone might find polling data to be an interesting topic, or for that matter, find history an exciting study; however, we seek to answer a question that needs to be answered, whether insipid or exciting we seek the facts as they are presented. As for fun, we’ll go to the movies afterwards to satisfied our fun drive.
Felipe, I completely agree with you when you say that history is not always “interesting” and sometimes has to be explained using numerical datas. I think your group’s idea would add a variety to the other group’s projects in the class. Some of the other groups are trying to answer questions that are more qualitative in their nature, while your group seems to be more focused on the quantitative aspects of the 2012 election. I can’t wait to see how your group progresses with this.
One concern I have about this topic is that the debates will be over in a few weeks, and a new narrative may (is even likely to) emerge, and then the election will happen and the debates may or may not have proven to be determinative of the outcome. That is not to say that it’s a bad topic; on the contrary, I think there’s a lot you can do with it. I just want to make sure that your _interest level_ in the topic isn’t being propelled by the most current events in the election and that it’s something you’ll be able to maintain over the course of the project.
If you are to proceed with this topic, you’ll need to take a few steps next. We want to make sure that there’s a historical trajectory to your project, that it’s looking not just at the current debates but also at the role of debates in past elections. So your group should look for some background reading (secondary sources… I’m sure there’s some good histories of presidential debates, but I don’t know any offhand). You need to nail down the facts… how have they varied over time, how were they accessed by the public, etc.
The next step will then to be to start to imagine how you can try to answer your questions — which are very well framed at this stage — with data, spatial, text analysis, and visual sources.
Are the debates going to have a lasting effect at all? This election is a very polarizing one, and it seems like many of the voters have made up their minds from the start, either for policy or similar reasons.