Social Media, Organizations, and Academic Research
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 […]
Including a hashtag in a social media message can increase its reach. The question is, what is the ideal number of tags to include? To answer this question, I examine 60,919 original tweets sent in 2014 by 99 for-profit and nonprofit member organizations of a large US health advocacy coalition. First, the following table shows […]
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. With that, here is a word cloud generated using all of the hashtags […]
One of the core tenets of scientific research is replication. This gets at the reproducibility standard of scientific research. Despite calls for more replication in the social sciences, replication studies are still rather rare. In part, this is the product of journal editors’ and reviewers’ strong preferences for original research. It is also due to […]
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 […]
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 (and frankly, I think academics who are unwilling to share should be forced to take remedial Kindergarten). The problem is, many of those […]
