School of Social and Political Science

Description

The course will introduce using Twitter as a data source to answer social scientific questions. We will be using R to scrap and analyse tweets.

I will first briefly talk about the R environment and the nature of the Twitter data. Then, I will introduce standard scraping methods like searching tweets and users; streaming sample tweets and keywords; getting timelines, mentions, favorites, retweets. We will then talk about processing and summarising the scrapped Twitter data using tables and graphs.

Finally, we will apply some simple NLP methods such as sentiment analysis to delve a bit deeper into the data we have collected.

Some experience with R could make it easier to follow the course, but it is not required.

Instructor: Dr Ugur Ozdemir

Structure: Synchronous. The online live session will take place on Thursday 18 March 2021 between 10:00 and 13:00 via Collaborate.