My name is Tristan Hotham, I am a PhD Researcher at the University of Bath.

I study, social media, elections, party politics and campaigning.

Within the field I specifically have an interest in social media, elections, political parties and campaigning. My specialisms are UK political parties and the use of Facebook. I utilise a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to open the locked chest of social media campaigning.

I hold two Master’s degrees from the Universities of Bath and Durham respectively, alongside a Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Exeter. I currently work on a ESRC funded PhD at the University of Bath – my thesis is titled; “Examining the impact and effectiveness of Facebook on party campaigns”.

My thesis examines the Facebook phenomenon and its role as a campaign tool. Using extracted Facebook data and supportive external data sources such as the BES/EAS and Whotargets.me, this study examines the impact Facebook is having as a campaign tool online, alongside its wider offline implications for parties campaigning in an era of party change. The thesis examines pages content approaches effectiveness in garnering engagement, alongside examining the impact Facebook and social media is having upon how parties are campaigning.

Alongside my academic interests I enjoy public engagement,  as such I have been featured in:

Please explore this website, get in contact if you would like a discussion, and please check out my thoughts via my Bitrate Politics Blog (above) and YouTube channel.  See this video below about Facebook’s data access problems, they are restricting search results and making it very hard to examine the platform.

© Tristan Hotham, 2019.