Social Media Research

To help you get started, we have prepared a number of short text and video tutorials for your review bellow.

Look at the Getting Started section to start your journey with Facepager. The wiki will help you to understand the program: how it works and what you can do with it. The FAQ will help you to get the answers to the most common questions.

This tutorial course has been designed thinking about students, researchers, or professionals whose training has been in the humanities or social sciences, who are interested in analyzing the narrative and reactions to certain posts on public Facebook pages, such as newspapers, organizations, or famous people, among others. Also, when designing these lessons I thought of people who have not had experience with the use of technological tools. As well as in those who might feel a little resistance to learn more complex skills like programming that takes a little more time to learn. This course is intended to be an easier way to accomplish a complete task and an introduction for many who will be preparing to learn more.

In this lesson, users will learn how to analyze and explore Twitter data with the Python/command line tool twarc. We’re specifically going to work with twarc2, which is designed for version 2 of the Twitter API (released in 2020) and the Academic Research track of the Twitter API (released in 2021), which enables researchers to collect tweets from the entire Twitter archive for free. Twarc was developed by a project called Documenting the Now. The DocNow team develops tools and ethical frameworks for social media research.

Twarc is a command line tool and Python library for archiving Twitter JSON data, developed as part of the Documenting the Now project. In addition to letting you collect tweets, twarc can also help you collect users, trends and hydrate tweet ids. The included pages provide step-by-step tutorials on installing and using twarc, for both Windows and Mac users. Parts of this guide are subject to change with updates to Twitter developer terms, so please use this guide as a general guideline.

DocNow allows archivists to tap into conversations in Twitter to help them discover what web resources for collection and preservation. It also connects archivists with content creators in order to make the process of archving web content more collaborative and consentful. The purpose of DocNow is to help ensure ethical practices in web archiving by building conversations between archivists and the communities they are documenting.