In my latest tutorial I walked readers through a Python script designed to download tweets by a set of Twitter users and insert them into an SQLite database. In this post I will provide my own thoughts on the pros and cons of using a relational database such as SQLite vs. a “noSQL” database such […]
Below is an embedded version of an iPython notebook I have made publicly available on nbviewer. To download a copy of the code, click on the icon with three horizontal lines at the top right of the notebook (just below this paragraph) and select “Download Notebook.” I hope you find it helpful. If so, please […]
The Twitter API (application programming interface) is your gateway to accessing Twitter data. The image above shows a screenshot of Twitter’s Search API, just one of the key parts of the API you might be interested in. To access any of them you’ll need to have a password. So, in this post I’m going to […]
This is a series of iPython notebooks for analyzing Big Data — specifically Twitter data — using Python’s powerful PANDAS (Python Data Analysis) library. Through these tutorials I’ll walk you through how to analyze your raw social media data using a typical social science approach. The target audience is those who are interested in covering […]
You want to download and analyze “Big Data” — such as messages or network data from Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. But you’ve never done it before, and you’re wondering, “Do I need to learn computer programming?” Here are some decision rules, laid out in the form of brief case studies. One-Shot Download with Limited […]
Below is an embedded version of an iPython notebook I have made publicly available on nbviewer. To download a copy of the code, click on the icon with three horizontal lines at the top right of the notebook (just below this paragraph) and select “Download Notebook.” I hope you find it helpful. If so, please […]
So you want to download “Big Data.” You could be a social scientist wanting to take your first stab at downloading and analyzing 100 organizations’ worth of tweets. Or a marketing or public relations practitioner interested in analyzing Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest YouTube activity by your competitors. Or a budding data scientist interested in […]
More and more of my research involves some degree of ‘Big Data’ — typically datasets with a million or so 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 […]
I often get requests to explain how I obtained the data I used in a particular piece of academic research. I am always happy to share my code along with my data. Having been through the learning process myself about 5 years ago, I understand the confusion and frustration that can go along with learning […]
I frequently get requests for how to download social media data in general, as well as for help on how to run code I have written to download and analyze the data I analyzed for a particular piece of research. Often, these requests are from people who are excited about doing social media research but […]
