social feed managerdchud @ gwu edu

Access 2012 Montreal October 19 2012

how do researchersstudy social media?

by hand.

•google reader

•copy and paste

• fold, spindle, mutilate

•excel

• ...eventually, SPSS or equiv

whatever help

they can get

it’s a lot of workfor not a lot of data

(1000s of tweets)

research opportunitiesare

endless

colldev opportunitiesare

endless

copy and pasteto excel

doesn’t scale

just ask any student assigned to do this!

options?

Twitter-licensed data providers:

DataSiftGnipTopsy

what we’ve learned• friendly

•not cheap

•more than we need

•expensive

•still need tools to collect, process, etc.

what researchers ask for

• specific users, keywords

• historic time periods

• basic values: user, date, text, counts

• 1000s, not 10000000s

• delimited files to import

we can do some of thisfree

w/public API

some we’ll haveto buy

twitter api

•user timelines: up to 3200, plus new

•public streams: follow, track, geo, up to 3000/minute

• search

user timelines

public streams

search

social-feed-manager

•python/django

•user timelines, filter, sample, search

• simple display / export for user timelines

• free software, on github

does thingswe can do

what about...

•older data for busy users

•historic events

•keywords over time

$$$$today

...so start collectingtoday

github.com /gwu-libraries /

social-feed-manager

@dchud || @liblaura