Workshop: Social Media Data
Time
17. - 18. February 2022
Location
Y213 and online
Organizer
Exzellenzcluster "The Politics of Inequality"
Speaker:
Digital traces are a source of research data suitable to answer a host of research questions in the social sciences. This data is big and non-reactive, but it is also (sometimes) dirty, incomplete, and non-representative (see, e.g., Salganik 2018). This workshop provides an introduction to collecting and analyzing on form of digital traces: social media data. The workshop's focus is on the collection of data from the social network Twitter. Still, we will also have an outlook on other kinds of internet-based social media (e.g., Youtube), and we will discuss more fundamentally the characteristics of social media data and how to account for this in your research.
This workshop introduces Twitter API and provides multiple examples of collecting and analyzing Twitter data. The course will start with a general introduction of Twitter's API, available data, and limitations. Subsequently, participants will learn how to collect diverse types of Twitter data (e.g., user timelines, tweets including certain keywords). The course will discuss summary statistics of interested features, simple text analysis, and network analysis (e.g. retweet network) to analyze collecting data. Along with the data analysis, diverse possibilities for visualization will be demonstrated as well.
Presenter: Taehee Kim is a lecturer at the Social Science Department of the Carl von Ossietzky Unirvesity Oldenburg. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Keio University, Japan.
Date: 9 November 2021 – First meeting, discussion of course content and expectations on R proficiency
17 / 18 February 2022 – Workshop
Venue: Room Y 213 (if the pandemic situation allows for it, 3G rules apply) and on Zoom
Participants: This course is open to all members of the Cluster “The Politics of Inequality”. Members of the GSBS and other members of Uni Konstanz can register and will be able to attend if places are available.
Registration: Please register via e-mail by 01 November 2021.
This workshop is suitable for the participants who would like to use Twitter (and similar types of digital trace) data for their future research. We will use either R or Python for the course, the choice will be made by consultation of the participants. Participants should have basic knowledge about how to use R or Python, but we will distribute a list of concepts necessary, together with some self-learning resources in the first meeting three months prior to the Workshop.
