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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In this post I’ll provide a brief tutorial on how to create a tag cloud, as seen here. First, this assumes you have downloaded a set of tweets into an SQLite database. If you are using a different database please modify accordingly. Also, to get to this stage, work through the first 8 tutorials listed […]
Word clouds are generally not all that helpful given how the words are taken out of their context (sentences). In certain settings, however, they do provide meaningful information. Hashtags are one of those contexts — they are meant to be single words. The tags denote ideas or topics or places. By examining the hashtags, we […]
This post is a brief, temporary attempt at pointing people in the right direction for a common task: downloading tweets sent by a number of different Twitter users. It is directed at those who are new to Python and/or downloading data from the Twitter API. OK, so I am assuming you have made it through […]
