To qualitative researchers, social media offers a novel opportunity to harvest a massive and diverse range of content without the need for intrusive or intensive data collection procedures. However, performing a qualitative analysis across a massive social media data set is cumbersome and impractical. Instead, researchers often extract a subset of content to analyze, but a framework to facilitate this process is currently lacking. We present a four-phased framework for improving this extraction process, which blends the capacities of data science techniques to compress large data sets into smaller spaces, with the capabilities of qualitative analysis to address research questions. We demonstrate this framework by investigating the topics of Australian Twitter commentary on climate change, using quantitative (non-negative matrix inter-joint factorization; topic alignment) and qualitative (thematic analysis) techniques. Our approach is useful for researchers seeking to perform qualitative analyses of social media, or researchers wanting to supplement their quantitative work with a qualitative analysis of broader social context and meaning.

In recent years, studies related to topic derivation in Twitter have gained a lot of interest from businesses and academics. The interconnection between users and information has made social media, especially Twitter, an ultimate platform for propagation of information about events in real time. Many applications require topic derivation from this social media platform. These include, for example, disaster management, outbreak detection, situation awareness, surveillance, and market analysis. Deriving topics from Twitter is challenging due to the short content of the individual posts. The environment itself is also highly dynamic. This paper presents a review of recent methods proposed to derive topics from social media platform from algorithms to evaluations. With regard to algorithms, we classify them based on the features they exploit, such as content, social interactions, and temporal aspects. In terms of evaluations, we discuss the datasets and metrics generally used to evaluate the methods. Finally, we highlight the gaps in the research this far and the problems that remain to be addressed.