Twitter Studies (Social Media Studies)

[Adelaide9216]

Hello,

does anyone know of any software, trainings and books that talk about how to analyse Twitter data? I'm looking to conduct a critical content analysis of Twitter data in relation to my thesis topic, and I have zero idea where to begin or where to look on how to do this.

 

Thanks!

[hantoo]

Hey there!

So there is a good amount of literature on this, and I would recommend doing some research on digital ethnography, it's a pretty hot research area in anthropology at the moment. I haven't done much in terms of Twitter research, but I did do a social media study focused on visual content on primarily Instagram, snapchat and other platforms, and I drew on visual and digital anthropology scholarship. I am not sure exactly what aspect you're looking into, but you should be able to find methods articles on social network analysis on Twitter, and you may find useful resources through the Social Media Research Foundation as well. In terms of software, I haven't used any personally for social media research, but I do know of Node XL which is a free visual network analysis plug in for Excel, and that could be especially useful for a content analysis.

[_angua]

I've done research on Fitspo where I literally pulled screenshots and coded manually but unless you have some RAs to help I wouldn't really recommend this! Social media is a hot topic in Psychology right now so you might want to check out some of the lit there. I've seen some studies use Netlytic (https://socialmedialab.ca/apps/netlytic/) to do network analysis with large data sets but I don't know if there are other options.

[Pierre de Olivi]

I'm not familiar with Twitter-specific research or methods but you may be interested in reading about quantitative/digital approaches to social science and techniques of web scraping. I did a project using some of these for a professor in religious studies. I had some background in code but used Reyes' Introduction to Data Science for Social and Policy Research to brush up on specific techniques. It does not talk about twitter specifically but explains the foundational methods that you can then apply to gather data from twitter.

I imagine there is an API that lets you easily gather (public?) tweets to analyze quantitatively. You can get the basics from Reyes and Google and then search around for how to specifically do this. I just did a very quick and dirty search of "twitter web scraping python" and found several helpful results, but I am hesitant to recommend anything without having used it myself first.

I hope this helps!

[Adelaide9216]

Thanks everyone!