Access 2012 Day 1: Ignite Talk – Social Feed Manager

To collect social media data (especially Twitter), researchers are doing this manually (possibly by proxy).

 

Some paid options to collect the data:

  • DataSift
  • Gnip
  • Topsy

Friendly, but not cheap, and more than what we need. Still need tools to collect, process, etc.

What researchers ask for:

  • specific users, keywords
  • historic time periods
  • basic values: user, date, text, counts
  • delimited files to import

We can do this free with APIs.

Built Social Feed Manager with features

  • Users by Item Count with temporal graphs
  • Details on user
  • can export to CSV files
  • hashtag queries by 10 minutes
  • search function with 1000

Free on github

  • python/django
  • user timelines, filter, sample, search
  • simple display with export for user timelines

Leaves out:

  • historical tweets
  • tweets beyond last 3200

By @dchud

More notes on the Access 2012 live blog.