Analyzing Twitter Data

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python

Alex Hanna

Computational Social Scientist

Why Analyze Twitter Data?

Why Analyze Twitter Data?

Source: Conover et al. (2011)

What you can't analyze

• Can't collect data on observers
• Free-level of access is restrictive
  • Can't collect historical data
  • Only a 1% (unverified) sample

What you can analyze

• 1% sample is still a few million tweets
• Within a tweet
  • Text
  • User profile information
  • Geolocation
  • Retweets and quoted tweets

Let's review!

Analyzing Social Media Data in Python