July 2016
Collecting and Analysing Social Media Data Using SocialMediaLab Workshop - ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference 2016
Note: "vosonSML" is the new name for the R package that was previously called "SocialMediaLab". These archived documents may contain materials (e.g. R scripts) that refer to the old package. For up-to date references please visit the Training workshops page or the vosonSML page.
Welcome to the web page for the SocialMediaLab workshop held at ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference 2016, University of Sydney, 19th July 2016. The workshop is being run by Rob Ackland and Tim Graham from the Australian National University.
SocialMediaLab is an R package that provides a suite of tools for collecting and constructing networks from social media data. It provides easy-to-use functions for collecting data across popular platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) and generating different types of networks for analysis.
The lead developer and maintainer of SocialMediaLab is Tim Graham, with contributions from Rob Ackland and Chung-hong Chan from the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
The package can be found on CRAN and the development version is available on github.
This web page provides information and scripts for workshop participants.
In order for us to cover as much ground as possible in the workshop, it is important that you have already installed SocialMediaLab and also have API access (for Facebook and YouTube), before the workshop starts. RStudio will be used for the demonstration.
First thing you should do is follow the SocialMediaLab installation instructions in the Rmd file below.
You can find instructions on how to get API access forvarious data sources on the the SocialMediaLab page on the VOSON Lab website. This page also has a beginners guide to SocialMediaLab (but note: you should follow the installation instructions in the Rmd file below)
In this workshop, we will only focus on Facebook and YouTube data.
We will be working through the following tutorial [Rmd, pdf].
Here are some datasets we will be using in the tutorial (we will be collecting similar data via the APIs; these are here in case you are unable to collect the data yourself):
- 2015-03-01_to_2015-03-02_StarTrek_FacebookData.csv
- 2015-03-01_to_2015-03-02_StarWars_FacebookData.csv
- g_bimodal_facebook_star_trek.graphml
- g_bimodal_facebook_star_wars.graphml
Here is the lastest help file for SocialMediaLab.
Here are some introductory slides.