Project Inventory

Instigator Group members: Robert Sorenson, Jordan Smith, Felipe Francois

Archiving History Digitally Historical question:  What effect did the debates have on, specifically, the 1960, 1992, and 2012 presidential election outcomes?

Workload: Jordan will be covering the 1960 debates/election, Robert will be researching the 1992 debates/election, and Felipe will be working on this year’s debates/elections. We will be focusing on undecided voters, as they are the most influenced by debates. Some of the outlets we are considering for our debate feedback are CNN, Fox, the New York Times qand other online sources.

Some obvious challenges we anticipate are with respect to collecting data. Like getting access to recordings, transcripts and poll data of the debates. Another problem is how do we put the information together so that it makes sense and reflect the actual debate. Lastly keeping our own biases at bay so that we represent the facts as they appear.

Possible sources for the debates are:

Commission on Presidential Debates.- http://www.debates.org/

2012 Election Central– http://www.2012presidentialelectionnews.com/2012-debate-schedule/2012-presidential-debate-schedule/

FactCheck.org. – http://factcheck.org/2012/11/obamas-numbers-updated/

Pew Research Center– http://pewresearch.org/

270 To Win– 270toWin,

Gallup –gallup polls,

We plan to use wordle, Fusion Table and other major social networking sites, such as Twitter, tumblr to give a gage of this presidential election. For the other earlier years we’ll use exit polls of those elections since we didn’t have those technology in the years we choose. We will be doing more research on how we will handle the issue of data mining.