On the quest of discovering cultural trails in social media

With the constant increasing reach of the Web and in particular of Social Media, people create and share content that harbors information about habits, norms, preferences and values. Consequently, studying how culture influences users in online social media has increased the interest of several sectors such as the advertising industry, search engines and corporations. As a consequence, anthropological and computational models need to interact and complement each other to better target these new demands. Recently, several studies have analyzed culture from large-scale data but not many took into consideration the cultural models proposed by anthropological theory. By carrying out several experiments on large-scale data from the Web, we propose to combine theoretical concepts of culture with information technology techniques to process, analyze, model and interpret data from the Web. We plan to discover synergies between traditional social studies of culture and those derived from our experiments.