Entry Date:
November 18, 2011

Identifying Trends Through Online Social Media Analysis

Principal Investigator Peter Gloor

Project Start Date January 2007


The emergence of online social networks opens up unprecedented opportunities to read the collective mind, discovering emergent trends while they are still being hatched by small groups of creative individuals. The Web has become a mirror of the real world, allowing researchers in predictive analytics to study and better understand why some new ideas change our lives, while others never make it from the drawing board of the innovator.

In this project we study a wide range of methods for predictive analytics (coolhunting) mostly based on social network analysis and the emerging science of collaboration. We analyze large corpora of digital traces of human activity, in particular the Web, Blogs, online forums, social networking sites, e-mail archives, and phone logs. One result of our work is the software tool Condor (free for academic use) for dynamic social network analysis and content and sentiment analysis (available from the ickn.org web site).