Coalition-Cocktail – Hacking the Elections @ Engagor

Last weekend, Engagor organised their hacktheelections hackaton. The Datablend team (Quentin, Stijn and Davy) was joined by Marc Broos, Tim Coene and Josbert van de Zande with one goal in mind: trying to visualise the (pre-arranged?) political coalition and, if possible, also predict the formation-period.

Technically, we extracted over 160K tweets through the Engagor API. Next, a “sentiment”-based political graph was build and stored in the Neo4J graph database. A Gephi-based visualisation, based upon community detection, revealed the “truth”, which was, to be honest, a bit disappointing and at the same time somewhat expected: the political parties from Wallionia form a solid community while the Flemish parties are interconnected through many clusters. A warning sign for the upcoming formation process?

The slidedeck below provides an overview of the single day of hacking. Our results ranked third (on 8 teams). Although being very informative, it’s quite hard to compete with a “pokemon”-themed fighting animation between politicians *wink*. Many thanks to Engagor for the spotless organisation!