This document outlines steps for analyzing social media text data using semantic network analysis and visualization techniques: 1) Collecting Twitter data using Crimson Hexagon and cleaning the text by removing stop words and punctuation. 2) Performing analyses like frequency analysis, entity detection, topic modeling and sentiment analysis using packages like ConText. 3) Creating semantic networks to show word co-occurrence and visualize relationships between concepts, topics and sentiments.

1. SMAC LAB, LSU
OCT 26, 2018
SMAC Talks
Telling Stories from Social Media Text 2
Instructor: Dr. Ke (Jenny) Jiang

2. Telling Stories from Social Media Text 1
Collect Text Data
Clean Text
Text Analysis
Visualization
Python, TCAT, Crimson Hexagon…
Remove Stop Words, Stemming
Replacing “/”, “@” and “|” with space
Convert the text to lower case
Remove punctuations
Frequency Analysis, Sentiment Analysis
Entity Detection, Topic Modeling
Word Clouds, Semantic Network Analysis
R, Gephi
Tell a Story

3. Step 1: Collect Text Data Using Crimson Hexagon
Export 10,000 posts

4. Step 2: Create/Load a text file
a. Set Working Directory — Directory for trump.csv

5. b. Get a Sample
Step 3: Create/Load a Text File
Output

6. Step 4: Install and load the Required Packages

7. Create a text Corpus
Step 5: Load the Data as a Corpus
Output

8. Replacing “/”, “@” and “|” with space
Step 6: Clean Text
Output

9. Convert the text to lower case
Step 6: Clean Text
Output

10. Remove numbers
Step 6: Clean Text
Output

11. Remove english common stop-words
Step 6: Clean Text
Output

12. Remove your own stop word
Step 6: Clean Text
Output

13. Remove punctuations
Step 6: Clean Text
Output

14. Eliminate Extra White Spaces
Step 6: Clean Text
Output

15. Parse CSV Files
ConText Tutorials

16. Stemming
ConText Tutorials

17. Frequency
ConText Tutorials

18. Bigram
ConText Tutorials

19. Topic Modeling
ConText Tutorials

20. Sentiment Analysis
ConText Tutorials

21. Word Clouds of Topics and Sentiment
ConText Tutorials

22. Word Clouds of Topics and Sentiment
ConText Tutorials

23. Entity Detection
ConText Tutorials

24. Results
ConText Tutorials

25. Semantic Network Analysis

26. Words are hierarchically clustered in memory
(Collins & Quillian, 1972), and thus spatial
models that illustrate the relations among
words are representative of meaning (See
Barnett & Woelfel, 1988).
Theoretical Foundation

27. Theoretical Foundation
Complex Associations
Salient Concepts
Jiang, K., Benefield, G., Yang, J. F., & Barnett, G. A. (2017). Mapping Articles on China in Wikipedia: An Inter-Language Semantic
Network Analysis. In the Proceeding of Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS-50).

28. The extraction of the semantic network should
be restricted to the manifest content that
consists of fixed vocabulary
Latent meanings of the manifest content can be
inferred through the interpretation of patterns of
concept associations in the research context.
Characteristic

29. The most frequent words
Entities
Entities + Sentiment
Choice of Vocabulary

30. The principle of producing concept links of
semantic network is based on the measurement
of concept co-occurrence.
Co-occurrence Matrices

31. e.g. Semantic Networks of the Co-mention of Countries in News of Trump in 2017
Author: Ke Jiang
* Label Size: Frequency of Country Name Appeared in Titles of Trump News in NYT in 2017
* Link Weight: Number of Times Two Countries were Co-mentioned in Titles of Trump News in NYT in 2017
“Trump Calls for Closer Relationship Between U.S. and Russia”

32. Often, a concept pair can be given a connection
weight within certain unit of analysis equally
regardless of distance.
The unit of analysis can be a sentence, a
paragraph, an article (syntactical unit typical of
content analysis), 5 or 7 word sliding window.
Co-occurrence Matrices

33. Co-occurrence Matrices
social media giant silence million people
social 0 1 1 1 1 1
media 1 0 1 1 1 1
giant 1 1 0 1 1 1
silence 1 1 1 0 1 1
million 1 1 1 1 0 1
people 1 1 1 1 1 0
“Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people.”
social media giant silence million people

34. Co-occurrence Matrices
social media giant silence million people
social 0 1 1 1 1 0
media 1 0 1 1 1 1
giant 1 1 0 1 1 1
silence 1 1 1 0 1 1
million 1 1 1 1 0 1
people 0 1 1 1 1 0
“Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people.”
social media giant silence million people

35. The salience of the concept can be measured
through the analysis of concept centrality that
reflects the location and the importance of a
concept in relation with other concepts in the
network (Freeman, 1979; Wasserman & Faust,
1994).
Concept Centralities

36. Degree: the total number of direct links.
Betweenness: the extent to which a node lies on the shortest path
connecting others in the network (Freeman, 1979).
Closeness: the average distance that a node location is from all
others in the network (Freeman, 1979).
Eigenvector centrality: an indicator of a node’s overall centrality in
a network (Bonacich, 1972).
Concept Centralities

37. Jiang, K., Anderton, B. N., Ronald, P. C., & Barnett, G. A. (2018). Semantic Network Analysis Reveals Opposing Online Representations of the Search Term “GMO”.
Global Challenges, 2.

38. InDegree: the number of ties that a semantic object received
OutDegree: the number of ties that a semantic subject
initiated
Concept Centralities
The semantic subject can be the actor or object primarily
doing or causing something, while the semantic object is the
actor or object that it is done to (Dixon, 1991).

39. Directional Semantic Network Example
Jiang, K., Barnett, G. A., Taylor, L. D., & Feng, B. (2018). Dynamic Co-evolutions of Peace Frames in the United States, Mainland China, and Hong
Kong: A Semantic Network Analysis. In B. Cook (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Examining Global Peacemaking in the Digital Age. (pp. 145 -168).
Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global.

40. In semantic networks, the association between
two concepts, A and B, can be defined as the
chance of reading about A given that one reads
about B in a random unit.
Concept Association

41. SMA focuses on examining the concept
associations by looking at the frequency with
which concepts co-occur or appear in close
proximity.
Concept Association

42. Jiang, K., Anderton, B. N., Ronald, P. C., & Barnett, G. A. (2018). Semantic Network Analysis Reveals Opposing Online Representations of the Search Term “GMO”. Global Challenges, 2.

43. Based on the results of semantic network
analysis, the dynamic evolution and co-evolution
of the semantic content can be tracked through
the analysis of semantic networks at different
points in time.
Co-evolution of Texts

44. Scholars can explore the correlation between
semantic networks at different times by
conducting QAP correlation analysis.
Co-evolution of Texts

45. 0.1
0.19
0.28
0.37
0.46
0.55
0.64
0.73
0.82
0.91
1
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
u&h c&h u&c
While US & China US&HK, China & HK
The convergence of US and China’s News HK News’ flexibility and independence
0.820.460.47
0.74
0.536
0.513
0.842
0.439
0.4
Iraq War
Annapolis
Conference
China become the
World’s Second
Largest
Economies
0.885
0.1
Jiang, K., Barnett, G. A., Taylor, L. D., & Feng, B. (2018). Dynamic Co-evolutions of Peace Frames in the United States, Mainland China, and Hong Kong: A
Semantic Network Analysis. In B. Cook (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Examining Global Peacemaking in the Digital Age. (pp. 145 -168). Hershey,
Pennsylvania: IGI Global.

46. Word Co-Occurence Network
ConText Tutorials

47. Word Co-Occurence Network
ConText Tutorials

48. Word Co-Occurence Network
ConText Tutorials

49. The most frequent words
Entities
Entities + Sentiment
Codebook

50. The most frequent words
Codebook1

51. Location
Codebook2

52. Entities + Sentiment
Codebook3

53. Entities + Sentiment
codebook3_nodel_attributes

54. Word Co-Occurrence Network
ConText Tutorials

55. Word Co-Occurrence Network
ConText Tutorials

56. Word Co-Occurrence Network
ConText Tutorials

57. Word Co-Occurrence Network
ConText Tutorials

58. Word Co-Occurrence Network
ConText Tutorials

59. Top 50+Topics
Visualization

60. Location
Visualization

61. Entities + Sentiments
Visualization

62. Entities + Topic Model
Visualization