Peering into the Internet Abyss: Using Big Data Audience Analysis to Understand Online Comments

TLDR

The article introduces big data audience analysis (BDAA) as a methodology for large‑scale audience studies, applying sentiment, statistical, and geolocation analyses to a corpus of 450,000 online comments to uncover trends. BDAA employs distant reading and thin description to analyze a 450,000‑comment corpus of online reader comments. The approach enables TPC researchers to better prepare for large‑scale audience studies.

Abstract

This article offers a methodology for conducting large-scale audience analysis called "big data audience analysis" (BDAA). BDAA uses distant reading and thin description to examine a large corpus of text data from online audiences. In this article, that corpus is approximately 450,000 online reader comments. We analyze this corpus through sentiment analysis, statistical analysis, and geolocation to identify trends and patterns in large datasets. BDAA can better prepare TPC researchers for large-scale audience studies.