The conversation about big data on Twitter. An approach to the analysis of the dominant discourse

Abstract

Big data analysis is emerging as the new paradigm of access to knowledge in such diverse fields of science as physics, medicine, genetics, social sciences, economy and communication. The analysis of data collected from social networks or search engines has become essential to know how humans communicate, as well as to define strategies in politics, economics or marketing. This paper analyses the presence of information about big data in one of today’s major social networks, the microblogging site Twitter. The main objective of this paper is the classification of users and posts in terms of their influence on the conversation about big data, and the identification of the dominant discourse in Twitter by analyzing the content of the messages posted. Our results point out a clear orientation of the information about big data towards business, prediction and decision making.

KEYWORDS: big data; prediction; social networks; Twitter; influence; content analysis.