Slides from the brief talk I gave on the app we're developing at GW Libraries in Washington DC to help campus researchers study data from social media services like Twitter.

1. social feed manager
dchud @ gwu edu
Access 2012 Montreal October 19 2012

2. how do researchers
study social media?

3. by hand.

4. •google reader
• copy and paste
• fold, spindle, mutilate
• excel
• ...eventually, SPSS or
equiv

5. whatever
help
they can get

6. it’s a lot of work
for not a lot of data

7. (1000s of tweets)

8. research opportunities
are
endless

9. colldev opportunities
are
endless

10. copy and paste
to excel
doesn’t scale
just ask any student assigned to do this!

11. options?

12. Twitter-licensed
data providers:
DataSift
Gnip
Topsy

13. what we’ve learned
•friendly
• not cheap
• more than we need
• expensive
• still need tools to
collect, process, etc.

14. what researchers ask for
• specific users, keywords
• historic time periods
• basic values: user, date, text,
counts
• 1000s, not 10000000s
• delimited files to import

15. we can do some of this
free
w/public API

16. some we’ll have
to buy

17. twitter api
• user timelines: up to 3200,
plus new
• public streams: follow, track,
geo, up to 3000/minute
• search

18. user timelines

23. public streams

25. search

27. social-feed-manager
• python/django
• user timelines, filter,
sample, search
• simple display / export
for user timelines
• free software, on github

28. does things
we can do

29. what about...
• older data for
busy users
• historic events
• keywords over
time

30. $$$$
today

31. ...so start collecting
today

32. github.com /
gwu-libraries /
social-feed-manager
@dchud || @liblaura