This master-class introduces participants to approaches for collecting and analysing network and text data from social media, with a focus on Twitter, YouTube and Reddit.
The main software used in the course is R, but we also introduce Gephi for advanced visualisation. Data collection is via the VOSON Dashboard and vosonSML R packages for collecting social media network and data. We also cover other important R packages for network and text analysis such as: igraph (network analysis and visualisation), quanteda (quantitative analysis of textual data), tidytext and tm (text mining), wordcloud (text word clouds).
The course will be particularly useful to academics and PhD students who want to become more computationally literate, and those from technical disciplines (e.g. computer science, engineering, information science) who want to become more familiar with social science approaches to big data research. The course will also be useful for people from industry and government whose work involves quantitative analysis of social media data, e.g. for marketing, social research, public relations, brand management, journalism, opinion analysis.
- Teacher: Rob Ackland