Applying Network Analysis to Online News Big Data

From a methodological perspective, we propose the use of data mining and predictive analytic techniques combined with descriptive measurements and clustering methods to analyse relational patterns within a Big Data set. The dataset, collected from the website of a large national newspaper, was extracted from news and comments of the online readers about the 2016 Italian constitutional review bill. We measured readers’ sentiment by analysing comments readers write on the newspaper. We also investigated the relational structures combining network analysis with Big Data techniques.