Aplicación del Análisis de Redes Sociales para el estudio de las redes de comunicación en línea: evidencia empírica de Twitter

Abstract

Social networking websites facilitate the access to massive amounts of data for empirical analysis. These data provide evidence to study the characteristics of online communication. Recently, researchers have been interested in the study of the structural characteristics of online communication networks for a better understating of the communication processes underlying the flow of messages from one individual to another on the Internet. This article shows an application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) with data mining techniques to study the structural characteristics of online communication networks. The data corresponds to a corpus of 46,301 tweets published between 2009 and 2015 about the financial crisis of the National University of Colombia, identified with the hashtag #crisisunal. The communication networks were built from the mentions between users with the @ symbol, for a total of 3,124 users connected by 4,143 edges, which structural properties were analyzed using R. The indicators analyzed were the size of the network, diameter, degree centrality, reciprocity and betweenness centrality. The results suggest that communication networks on Twitter present a non-continuous growth, a preferential attachment to the most connected users, vulnerable connections, little reciprocity in the exchange of messages and limited control of information.