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Automated analysis of actor–topic networks on twitter: New approaches to the analysis of socio‐semantic networks
Author(s) -
Hellsten Iina,
Leydesdorff Loet
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24207
Subject(s) - social media , computer science , set (abstract data type) , social network analysis , data science , semantic analysis (machine learning) , content analysis , microblogging , topic model , data set , semantic network , information retrieval , world wide web , natural language processing , sociology , artificial intelligence , social science , programming language
Social media data provide increasing opportunities for the automated analysis of large sets of textual documents. So far, automated tools have been developed either to account for the social networks among participants in the debates, or to analyze the content of these debates. Less attention has been paid to mapping co‐occurrences of actors (participants) and topics (content) in online debates that can be considered as socio‐semantic networks. We propose a new, automated approach that uses the whole matrix of co‐addressed topics and actors for understanding and visualizing online debates. We show the advantages of the new approach with the analysis of two data sets: first, a large set of English‐language Twitter messages at the Rio + 20 meeting, in June 2012 (72,077 tweets), and second, a smaller data set of Dutch‐language Twitter messages on bird flu related to poultry farming in 2015–2017 (2,139 tweets). We discuss the theoretical, methodological, and substantive implications of our approach, also for the analysis of other social media data.