MINING AND AGGREGATION OF CULTURAL DATA IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

Year 2017, Volume: 3 Issue: 7, 122 - 131, 30.04.2017

Evi Papaioannou Elpida Schiza

https://doi.org/10.18769/ijasos.309502

Abstract

The explosive growth of the
Internet, the emergence of social networks and recent technological advances
enabled an enormous user population to become actuators in this new emerging
cultural environment. Handheld wireless devices, like smartphones and tablets,
which can be internet-connected, allow users to join the Internet community
from any place at any time. Users are of various and diverse cultural profiles.
Social networks form a modern global environment where all these users can
actually become cultural actuators in the sense that they socialize,
communicate, announce and reproduce information promoting local, national and
international activities closely related to their cultural background.

Modern social networks, like
Facebook or Twitter, form active and vivid channels of cultural information
circulation. Thousands of single users or user groups make frequent
announcements about special cultural events, related to music, dance, theater,
cinema, gastronomy, performances, exhibitions, gatherings of a special cultural
character. In addition, such announcements made in the form of short, inclusive
posts bear unique online features so that their audience can immediately
exploit them. However, it remains an important challenge to efficiently mine
useful data from such populated, diverse and vaguely structured spaces.

Motivated by the case of Santorini
Island, Greece and a strong recent observation that local traditional
activities or special (multi-)cultural events and activities tend to be absent
from touristic guides and plans, we present a WordPress-based website which
automatically collects cultural data from Facebook and presents it in a
comprehensive way for promoting cultural activity in Santorini.

Lack of information implies lack of
knowledge which consequently results in a reduced interest and decision space.
Utilizing keywords spanning a variety of cultural activities and events, our
system serves as an aggregator for Facebook posts of particular cultural
interest. While several, mainly not collaborating, entities – like for instance
Facebook users or groups, websites, Twitter users or groups - do release this
sort of information, lack of organization and timely viewing makes it extremely
inefficient for interested entities to locate, evaluate and exploit this highly
distributed and unstructured material.

The experimental use of our system so far – as an application offered
from the Department of Cultural Heritage Management and New Technologies of the
University of Patras – shows that technology can
indeed serve an important role towards efficient cultural management and
fruitful intercultural cooperation.

Keywords

culture, data mining, social networks

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