Production of New Knowledge Through Automated Big Data Extraction from Social Bookmarking Systems

Social tagging systems have gained increasing popularity as a method of annotating and categorising a wide range of different web resources. We use big data from Web 2.0 in social research to discover some type of structuration around the issue of the globalisation of agriculture and, particularly, within Delicious. We retrieved a sample of 3,668 users, 2,148 URLs and 4,776 tags, and through social network analysis (SNA), we found out what types of URLs around our topic have been recommended via collaborative tagging, what types of actors label URLs around this topic, whether there is some type of structuration and hierarchy to be discovered in the network of the globalisation of agriculture (centrality, substructures, etc.), and what types of tags actors are using to specifically label (and thus define and qualify) the URLs on the globalisation of agriculture that they recommend through Delicious.