Big Social Data Analytics in Journalism and Mass Communication: Comparing Dictionary-based Text Analysis and Unsupervised Topic Modeling

This article presents an empirical study that investigated and compared two “big data” text analysis methods: dictionary-based analysis, perhaps the most popular automated analysis approach in social science research, and unsupervised topic modeling (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation [LDA] analysis), one of the most widely used algorithms in the field of computer science and engineering. By applying two “big data” methods to make sense of the same dataset—77 million tweets about the 2012 U.S. presidential election—the study provides a starting point for scholars to evaluate the efficacy and validity of different computer-assisted methods for conducting journalism and mass communication research, especially in the area of political communication.