Automatic Full Text Analysis in Public Social Media – Adoption of a Software Prototype to Investigate Political Communication

AbstractThe relevance of web 2.0 and social networks has increased rapidly in the last years. As people use different networks for different purposes, communication is a common goal. Activities in virtual social networks result in a massive amount of information. User-generated content is clustered respect to platform, way of communication as well as quality and richness of content. Often the subject of information exchange deals with personal issues concerning events and individuals. Until now this information is not considered by means of classic information retrieval. Identifying distinct subjects, gathering and analyzing information and putting them into relationship at once are open scientific challenges. This contribution describes an approach to partial aspects of this problem by providing a prototype for full text analysis in social networks. Furthermore, based on a test scenario of analyzing postings in the field of political communication, potentials and limitations of the prototype are discussed