Towards Democratizing Social Media Data Analysis and Visualization Using SoMDA

Abstract

Currently, access to social media is part of the daily lives of most people in the world, continuously generating a huge volume of data. In this context, social media offers the opportunity to obtain information and knowledge discovery, being able to reveal trends in social, economic, political and cultural context. However, the required effort demands the usage of APIs, script programming, server configuration, etc. These tasks usually are restricted to specialized users. In order to democratize the access to the information from social media, this work presents SoMDA, a platform for automating the process of extraction, analysis and visualization of social media data using distributed storage and dynamic visualization techniques. Platform evaluation was performed using Twitter data collected through SoMDA and a usability test applied to SoMDA Dashboard demonstrating positive results.