Study title

The data set represents processed data from individual web browsing histories collected during the EU Referendum campaign as part of ICM Unlimited Reflected Life's panel. Each line of data represents the number of times an individual user visited a news & information domain during the data collection period.The advent of Web 2.0 - the second generation of the World Wide Web, that allows users to interact, collaborate, create and share information online, in virtual communities - has radically changed the media environment, the types of content the public is exposed to as well as the exposure process itself. Individuals are faced with a wider range of options (from social and traditional media), new patterns of exposure (socially mediated and selective), and alternate modes of content production (e.g. user-generated content). In order to understand change (and stability) in opinions and behaviour, it is necessary to measure to what information a person has been exposed. The measures social scientists have traditionally used to capture information exposure usually rely on self-reports of newspaper reading and television news broadcast viewing. These measures do not take into account that individuals browse and share diverse information from social and traditional media on a wide range of platforms. According to the OECD's Global Science Forum 2013 report, social scientists' inability to anticipate the Arab Spring was partly due to a failure to understand 'the new ways in which humans communicate' via social media and the ways they are exposed to information. And social media's mixed record for predicting the results of recent UK elections suggests better tools and a unified methodology are needed to analyze and extract political meaning from this new type of data. We argue that a new set of tools, which models exposure as a network and incorporates both social and traditional media sources, is needed in the social sciences to understand media exposure and its...