Unveiling climates of opinion through Social Media Mining and Social Network Analysis in Twitter. The case of Common Core State Standards

The changes resulting from technological innovation through the Internet and social media are modifying the structure of interpersonal relationships. Social media mining (SMM) is the process of extracting, storing, representing, visualising, and analyzing massive amounts of user generated data in order to uncover meaningful patterns from interactions within social media. The intersection of Social Network Analysis (SNA) and SMM, in this case with Twitter, allows the visualization of what was previously invisible; the network structure of climates of opinion and the key actors or superhubs within that structure that hold disproportionate social influence. We present an analysis of the climate of opinion on Twitter about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), one of the most ambitious educational reforms over the last 50 years in the US.