Social Media, Organizations, and Academic Research
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 […]
While I work on my own version of the tutorial, my excellent co-author and former PhD student Weiai Xu has put together an informative tutorial for how to download tweets with a specific hashtag. Five steps to search and store tweets by keywords from Weiai Wayne Xu Wayne’s tutorial also contains his version of my […]
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 […]
This is the second in a series of posts to get you up and running on Python. In the first post I showed you which version of Python to install, how to check that the installation succeeded, and how to type in and run your first simple Python command. In this tutorial I will show […]
For the beginning coder, every step involved in getting up and running the programming language presents a new (and potentially frustrating) learning experience. In a prior post I gave an overview of my preferred Python distributions and my general thoughts on how to approach learning Python. In this and subsequent posts I will walk you […]
