Measuring Violence Levels in Mexico Through Tweets

Abstract

Measuring Mexico’s violence through tweets can play a crucial role in decision-making at the political level. In this chapter, we propose a novel way to evaluate what people say and how they feel about violence by analyzing Twitter data. To do this, we describe a methodology to create an indicator to denote social perception. This methodology uses technologies like Big Data, Twitter analytics, Web mining, and Semantic Web by manipulating software like ELK (Elasticsearch for data storage, Logstash for collecting data, and Kibana for data visualization); SPSS and R for statistical data analysis, and; Atlas.ti, Ghephi, and Wordle for semantic analysis. At the end of the chapter, we show our results with a word cloud, a social graph, and the indicator of social perception of violence in Mexico at the federal entities and metropolitan zones level.