As voting day rapidly approaches for the 2015 federal election, Spacing has been tracking the buzzwords for some urban concepts on the four federal parties’ websites to see who’s talking about what.
Much of the content on the topics we’ve chosen is dominated by the NDP and Liberals, which is partially a reflection on the accessibility of information on their sites and the emphasis on urban issues within those party platforms. The Conservatives’ web site, on the other hand, has a minimal amount of information about their party-wide platform and do not provide a search function for voters to look up specific policy ideas.
To track the keywords, we used Google’s site search function, which allows you to search a website for specific content. We noticed the Liberals, NDP, and Green Party have set up their pages so that each candidate’s site is linked to the main site, which means that any time any candidate mentions a keyword, it shows up in the main site’s search results. While this method is nowhere near scientific, it does provide a glimpse into how each of the parties use their web sites as a communication tool to share platform ideas (or lack thereof).
graphics by Julie Fish; photo by Adrian Berg
