Social Media, Organizations, and Academic Research
The bulk of my research involves some degree of ‘Big Data’ — such as datasets with a million or more tweets. Getting these data prepped for analysis can involve massive amounts of data manipulation — anything from aggregating data to the daily or organizational level, to merging in additional variables, to generating data required for […]
In this tutorial I walk you through how to use Python and MongoDB to download tweets from a list of Twitter users. This tutorial builds on several recents posts on how to use Python to download Twitter data. Specifically, in a previous post I showed you how to download tweets using Python and an SQLite […]
Twitter is not the Gutenberg Press. The ‘Big Data’ revolution is over-hyped. Nevertheless, Twitter is significant in a number of ways: For identifying trends. For rapid, near real-time dissemination of news. It has been used to track the progression of the flu and other infectious diseases. It has played a mobilizational role in the Arab […]
Being Director of Graduate Studies gives me plenty of time to reflect on what I’d like students to get out of graduate education. For budding academics, you have all likely heard (countless times!) that the ultimate “deliverable” is high-quality journal articles. Of this there is little doubt — at least in the fields I’m familiar […]
Academics and other researchers have to choose from a variety of research skills. Most social scientists do not add computer programming into their skill set. As a strong proponent of the value of learning a programming language, I will lay out how this has proven to be useful for me. A budding programmer could choose […]
The research I’ve done on organizations’ use of social media suggests there are three main types of messages that organizations send on social media: informational, community-building, and “action” (promotional & mobilizational) messages. Each type constitutes a different way of engaging with the intended audience: Informational messages serve to inform — about the organization’s activities or […]
