Introducing the Irish Election Open Database
Storyful has built an Irish Election Open Database to help citizens, news organisations, universities and others easily access and analyse information about candidates running in the 2016 general election
What is it?
The Irish Election Open Database is an open-source project hosted by Storyful. The Storyful team, in collaboration with Dublin City University (DCU) and a host of Irish political data enthusiasts, gathered and indexed information on every candidate running in the upcoming Irish general election, including candidates’ presence on social media.
How we built it
Storyful hosted a codeathon (or, in this case, “electathon”) in Dublin on Friday, November 6. Over nine hours, the editorial team, alongside journalism students from DCU, gathered information on candidates, using local and national news sources, Twitter, and the great work of Dr Adrian Kavanagh. At the same time, the development team built the infrastructure to host the data, and a website with a basic search functionality.
Who can use it?
Anyone!
We have built a simple search functionality on the database website that anyone can use to find information on candidates across the country.
The entire database is open source and we’d love news organisations, coders, and others to use it to help power searches on their websites, apps, and elsewhere. Additionally, the entire database can be downloaded in CSV format, allowing users to analyse trends, such as gender ratios across parties and regions, which parties are most active on social media, and so on.
If you would like more information about how you can use the data to power your projects, we’re happy to help — just contact us here.
How can you help?
We have information on more than 400 candidates running across 40 constituencies. However, we know more candidates will emerge and we know we can gather more details for each candidate. We will be adding to the database right up to polling day. If you spot any errors in our data, or have information on new candidates, or more information on candidates we have already indexed, let us know.
