April 2016
SocialMediaLab workshop at Northeastern University
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 Northeastern University Network Science Institute, 26 April 2016. The workshop is being run by Rob Ackland 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.
SocialMediaLab was created by Tim Graham (who is also the maintainer of the package) and Rob Ackland. A major contribution was also made by 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, 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. Note that this Rmd file was written for a workshop held at Indiana University, and it will be updated by the time of our workshop next Tuesday.
You can find instructions on how to get API access for the various 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 focus first on Twitter and Facebook, and then, if time permits, we will also cover a demonstration of collecting Instagram data.
We will be working through the following tutorial [Rmd, pdf].
Here is the lastest help file for SocialMediaLab.
Here are some introductory slides.
Some datasets (graphml) that you can use if you aren't able to collect data via the APIs: facebook, twitter.