Reading the riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data

Abstract

For social scientists, the widespread adoption of social media presents both an opportunity and a challenge. Data that can shed light on people’s habits, opinions and behaviour is available now on a scale never seen before, but this also means that it is impossible to analyse using conventional methodologies and tools. This article represents an experiment in applying a computationally assisted methodology to the analysis of a large corpus of tweets sent during the August 2011 riots in England.