REGULAR PAPER Social information landscapes Automated mapping of large multimodal, longitudinal social networks

Аннотация

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a Big Data solution as a methodological approach to the automated collection, cleaning, collation, and mapping of multimodal, longitudinal data sets from social media. The paper constructs social information landscapes (SIL). Design/methodology/approach – The research presented here adopts a Big Data methodological approach for mapping user-generated contents in social media. The methodology and algorithms presented are generic, and can be applied to diverse types of social media or user-generated contents involving user interactions, such as within blogs, comments in product pages, and other forms of media, so long as a formal data structure proposed here can be constructed. Findings – The limited presentation of the sequential nature of content listings within social media and Web 2.0 pages, as viewed on web browsers or on mobile devices, do not necessarily reveal nor make obvious an unknown nature of the medium; that every participant, from content producers, to consumers, to followers and subscribers, including the contents they produce or subscribed to, are intrinsically connected in a hidden but massive network. Such networks when mapped, could be quantitatively analysed using social network analysis (e.g. centralities), and the semantics and sentiments could equally reveal valuable information with appropriate analytics.