Extracting info from political news through big data network analysis

Recent years have witnessed extraordinary growth in globally generated data. The advent of automation of many of our activities has resulted in large volumes of routinely generated data about what we search for on-line, what we read, what we buy, and the list goes on. The automatic extraction of all this information, together with innovative data mining and predictive analytics techniques, combined with the analysis of relational patterns, can represent an innovative opportunity in supporting decision-making. Responding to a rising interest to understand and improve actionable analytics-driven decision patterns, this paper proposes the use of network analysis as a method both to foster the structured planning, to develop the implementation of decision-making actions and also measure effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of analytics decision-making networks from an empirical methodological perspective. The main aim of this study is to improve knowledge on big data techniques combined with network analysis methods in social research. In particular, descriptive measurements and clustering methods of Network Analysis are here employed in order to define relational structures within a big data set. A Big Data tool is developed to collect info from user interactions with published news and comments about a case study related to a recent Italian constitutional review bill with important political implications. It has been extensively reported online and it produced a lot of interest from online readers. Here, one of the most popular italian national newspapers is the main news source for the data collection of this analysis. Network analysis on the big data set is then used to extract and analyse essential information from a vast dataset, assuming that data is not only large, but also meaningful. By research outcomes, network analysis is suitable for big data to obtain informative data on the basis of relational structures among many and many comments used to measure people sentiment about online news in order to detect relevant items for policy-makers.