Towards a large-scale twitter observatory for political events

Abstract

Explosion in usage of social media has made its analysis a relevant topic of interest, and particularly so in the political science area. Within Data Science, no other techniques are more widely accepted and appealing than visualisation. However, with datasets growing in size, visualisation tools also require a paradigm shift to remain useful in big data contexts. This work presents our proposal for a Large-Scale Twitter Observatory that enables researchers to efficiently retrieve, analyse and visualise data from this social network to gain actionable insights and knowledge related with political events. In addition to describing the supporting technologies, we put forward a working pipeline and validate the setup with different examples.