7. Reading Tea Leaves: Discovering Themes, Topics, or Trends

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

—Ansel Adams [1]

Discovering themes and patterns from social media content can be a very exciting endeavor. This is the part of analysis where the detective in the analyst really comes out. This chapter focuses on the common goals of a majority of social data analysis projects. These goals fall into two broad categories: validation of hypothesis and discovery of themes. In the first category, the researcher already has a hypothesis (a prediction of what the likely outcome will be) in mind that he or she wants to validate. In the second major category, discovering themes or topics or trends, there ...

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