Please join us in congratulating Jenny Stromer-Galley for receiving the 2020 Doris Graber Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age!

In the book, Stromer-Galley challenges popular claims about the democratizing effects of Digital Communication Technologies (DCT’s).

Analyzing campaign strategies, structures, and tactics from the past six presidential elections cycles and reveals how, for all their vaunted inclusivity and tantalizing promise of increased two-way communication between candidates and the individuals who support them, DCT’s have done little to change the fundamental dynamics of campaigns. Stromer-Galley examines election cycles from 1996, when the World Wide Web was first used for presidential campaigning, through 2016, when campaigns had the full power of advertising on social media sites. The book shows how, even as campaigns have moved from mass-mediated to a network paradigm, the possibilities these shifts promise for citizen input and empowerment still remain farther than a click away.

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199731930.001.0001/acprof-9780199731930

Jenny Stromer-Galley is Professor in the School of Information Studies, Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs, and an Affiliate for the Center for Computational and Data Science at Syracuse University. She and her colleagues, Jeff Hemsley and Patricia Rossini, recently received a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation grant for their collaborative research project, Illuminating 2020, which is studying the 2020 presidential campaign by collecting and algorithmically classifying the candidates’ and public’s postings and paid ads on social media.

The Center for Computational and Data Science (CCDS) is committed to advancing important and practical research in the social sciences, using advanced computational approaches. The Center builds on the iSchool’s historic strengths in Human Language Technologies, such as Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, and the School’s current emphasis on Data Science research. CCDS researchers work to advance the science of data collection, retrieval, curation, analysis, and archiving and apply those techniques to important social problems.