Discovery of emergent issues and controversies in anthropology using text mining, topic modeling, and social network analysis of microblog content
RIS ID
104814
Abstract
R is a convenient tool for analyzing text content to discover emergent issues and controversies in diverse corpora. In this case study, I investigate the use of Twitter at a major conference of professional and academic anthropologists. Using R I identify the demographics of the community, the structure of the community of Twitter-using anthropologists, and the topics that dominate the Twitter messages. I describe a series of statistical methods for handling a large corpus of Twitter messages that might otherwise be impractical to analyze. A key finding is that the transformative effect of Twitter in academia is to easily enable the spontaneous formation of information-sharing communities bound by an interest in an event or topic.
Publication Details
Marwick, B. (2013). Discovery of emergent issues and controversies in anthropology using text mining, topic modeling, and social network analysis of microblog content. In Y. Zhao & Y. Cen (Eds.), Data Mining Applications with R (pp. 63-93). USA: Elsevier.