Social Media, Organizations, and Academic Research
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 […]
This page is mostly for me as a handy reference for all those Python commands I tend to forget. That said, if it proves helpful to any others, all the better! Lists Create list by slicing items of another list: Combine two lists into a dictionary: Get list of all files in a directory: Find […]
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 […]
