Congratulations to Political Science Professor Bob Boynton. His New Media in Political Discourse project was selected by Center for Research Libraries to receive the 2010 Primary Source Award for research. CRL gives out just three Primary Source Awards annually, one each for teaching, research, and access.

Boynton studies the use of new media in political discourse. His current research compares micro-blogging (Twitter) with mainstream media coverage for global news events, and Joanna Lee in Digital Library Services worked with Prof. Boynton to build a system that captures live Twitter feeds for data analysis. Support was provided by Chris Clark, head of Desktop Support Services.

The project, which involved collecting Twitter data by constantly running The Archivist, a free tool for harvesting “tweets,” is explained in a poster created by Lee and Boynton.

See the DLS Web site for more on the Libraries’ involvement in this project.