Spring 2025
“Called It”: Prediction and Sensemaking in the 2024 Election
Instructors: Nina Lutz and Kate Starbird
During emergent and high stakes events social media is a palace where people come together to make sense of uncertainty, speculate on what is or will occur, and gain community. "Called It" will be a DRG in Spring 2025 quarter where we analyze a dataset of cross-platform narratives and instances of people "calling it" during the course of the 2024 Presidential Election Season -- from aggregators of betting markets asking you to bet on who would win certain swing states to astrologers analyzing natal charts of candidates.
In this DRG, students will learn how to qualitatively code media from X and Tiktok. Each week we will meet for arbitration and to discuss the data.
Students who stick with the project and complete additional tasks may have the opportunity for authorship on an academic paper.
The timing for the DRG is TBD but will be based on this application form and the accepted students. Some students may be continuing from Winter, where we developed the codebook to be used in this analysis.
Application to this DRG is closed for Spring 2025.
Questions? Email Nina Lutz, PhD Student, at ninalutz@uw.edu
Winter 2025
“Called It”: Prediction and Sensemaking in the 2024 Election
Instructors: Nina Lutz and Kate Starbird
We will curate and begin analysis of a dataset of cross platform narratives and instances of people "Calling It" during the course of the 2024 Presidential Election Season -- from calling Senate races to Biden stepping down to astrologers predicting Harris would win or tarot cards saying RFK and Trump would be co-presidents. We want to gather, curate this dataset, and set the stages for analysis of it. We want to understand -- what role did prediction play in sensemaking across different online communities and how did predictive trends and tactics vary across different interfaces and communities?
Roles will involve developing queries and computationally and manually collecting and curating data for analysis, as well as thematic analysis and beginning some inductive coding of the data.
Students who stick with the project and complete additional tasks will have the opportunity for authorship on an academic paper.
This DRG is may continue in Spring 2025 quarter as well, pending research progress and needs!
This DRG has some returning students from the election and border crisis work, but we seek about 2 new students!
Application to this DRG is closed for Winter 2025.