Big Data Analytics and the Social Web: a Tutorial for the Social Scientist
Markus Schatten, Jurica Ševa, Bogdan Okreša-Đurić · 2015
Abstract. The social web or web 2.0 has become the biggest and most accessible repository of data about human (social) behaviour in history. Due to a knowledge gap between big data analytics and established social science methodology, this enormous source of information, has yet to be exploited for new and interesting studies in various social and humanities related fields. To make one step towards closing this gap, we provide a detailed step-by-step tutorial on some of the most important web mining and analytics methods on a real-world study of Croatia’s biggest political blogging site. The tutorial covers methods for data retrieval, data conversion, cleansing and organization, data analysis (natural language processing, social and conceptual network analysis) as well as data visualization and interpretation. All tools that have been implemented for the sake of this study, data sets through the various steps as well as resulting visualizations have been published on-line and are free to use. The tutorial is not meant to be a comprehensive overview and detailed description of all possible ways of analyzing data from the social web, but using the steps outlined herein one can certainly