Automatic Mapping of Social Networks of Political Actors from Large Collections of News Stories

To illustrate the use of the semantic network analysis package WORDij 3.0 for automatic social network analysis, this research mapped the social networks of the cabinet members of presidential administrations from Nixon to G.W. Bush large using collections of news stories. Every news story written in the New York Times and Washington Post about each cabinet member during their terms was mined. Network visualizations and centrality statistics were computed as illustrative of main approaches to social network analysis. The method of network data mining reported here is based on having a list of names for which one wants to map social networks from documents. The software processes gigabytes of text to produce standard network data on the actors based on their co-appearance in news stories or other documents on the Web.