Beyond Keywords
Name
Madnick_2017_JN_Beyond-Keywords.pdf
Size
1.87 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6f40aebaca06e77aca15b6c87e801e41
Author(s)
Tounaka, Nobuaki
Nakamura, Kazutaka
Sugiyama, Takaaki
Nakagawa, Daisuke
Shirnen, Buyanjargal
Houghton, James P
Siegel, Michael D
Madnick, Stuart E
Date Issued
October 2017
Journal
Sociological Methods & Research
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
Houghton, James P., Michael Siegel, Stuart Madnick, Nobuaki Tounaka, Kazutaka Nakamura, Takaaki Sugiyama, Daisuke Nakagawa, and Buyanjargal Shirnen. “Beyond Keywords.” Sociological Methods & Research (October 10, 2017): 004912411772970. © 2017 The Authors
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
The potential of social media to give insight into the dynamic evolution of public conversations, and into their reactive and constitutive role in political activities, has to date been underdeveloped. While topic modeling can give static insight into the structure of a conversation, and keyword volume tracking can show how engagement with a specific idea varies over time, there is need for a method of analysis able to understand how conversations about societal values evolve and react to events in the world by incorporating new ideas and relating them to existing themes. In this article, we propose a method for analyzing social media messages that formalizes the structure of public conversations and allows the sociologist to study the evolution of public discourse in a rigorous, replicable, and data-driven fashion. This approach may be useful to those studying the social construction of meaning, the origins of factionalism and internecine conflict, or boundary-setting and group-identification exercises and has potential implications. Keywords: social media, framing, public conversation, analysis tools, visualization
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124117729705
