April 2016
SocialMediaLab workshop at Sunbelt 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 at the 2016 International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Newport Beach, California, 5-10 April 2016. The workshop is being run by Tim Graham and Rob Ackland, and will be held 8am-11am on Tuesday 5th April.
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.
As a start, please see the SocialMediaLab page on the VOSON Lab website, for a beginners guide to SocialMediaLab (including how to install the pacakge) and also (importantly) information on how to obtain access to the APIs for the various social media data sources.
In this workshop, we will focus first on Twitter and Facebook, and then, if time permits, we will also cover Instagram and YouTube.
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. We will be using RStudio.
We will be working through the following tutorial [Rmd, pdf].
Here is the lastest help file for SocialMediaLab.
Here is the SocialMediaLab Data Typology, which we presented in the workshop today.