The digital world makes data collection easier. However, without the right approach, big data becomes even more difficult.
“Unstructured data is growing every year. The analysis is needed so that the data is measurable and easier to interpret,” said Dian Puteri Ramadhani, a lecturer at Telkom University, while giving a guest lecture at the Master of Business Administration (MBA) ITB program on July 12, 2023, in Bandung.
In this guest lecture, Dian explained Social Network Analysis (SNA). This data analysis system functions to make data more structured, making it easy to make measurements. SNA is an analysis that has the function of describing how the social structure and the relationship between social structures.
Dian explained that there are many ways to process unstructured data. Data from social media, such as social media applications, e-commerce, or news portals, can be processed using Structure Analysis and Content Analysis. Next, the distribution structure can be analyzed using SNA and Text Analysis to describe the topics discussed.
SNA describes interconnected structures, representing individuals or systems in a network (nodes) and those describing relationships or interactions between these individuals (edges). Furthermore, SNA makes it easy to know the various functions of data. For example, the frequency of positive and negative images of a place, understanding social behavior, measuring personality, and analyzing sentiment.
SNA as data processing has various social, general, and economic benefits. SNA is interesting because it explains a person’s behavior in a social situation. For example, someone’s behavior in using social media, regarding the spread of fake news and virality news, and from an economic perspective, to see the evolution of export-import.
“For businesses, SNA can be useful for promotional purposes, for example, choosing the most influential influencers,” added Dian.
Dian then showed how Gephi works, an open-source software for visualizing and analyzing large network graphs. Gephi uses a 3D render engine to display real-time graphs and speed up the exploration. People can use it to explore, analyze, spatialize, filter, clutter, manipulate and export all graphs.
