Skip to content

Social Media

Acquiring data from social media sites can be very valuable and important for certain research topics. However, because of the relative infancy of social media as a platform, the process of acquiring data can be a little tricky.

  • There are many tools that you can use to trawl through certain social media platforms however there is no consensus on which are the most effective.
    • Also note that some tools require an understanding of certain coding languages (such as R, Python, etc.)
  • A lot of the guides written on searching social media are at least a couple of years old. Since social media is constantly changing, consider whether their advice is still relevant.

CeR run a 'hacky hour'. Slides and notes for past sessions including 'Social media data scraping and wrangling tips and tricks' are at:
https://uoa-eresearch.github.io/HackyHour/tips-tricks-sessions/  
See also their hacky hour:https://uoa-eresearch.github.io/HackyHour/
For additional help and advice contact CeR.

Please make sure you have ethics approval for any projects requiring you to use social media data.

The following are a selection of guides and resources. Be aware that the information may be dated as this is a fast evolving area.

  • The University of Queensland library has a useful guide Search social media.

  • Social media research toolkit 'curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, Canada. The kit features tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies. Many tools are free to use and require little or no programming'.

  • Social feed manager from GW Libraries (George Washington University) 'open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weib'
  • Where to get twitter data for academic research 2017 blog post from Justin Littman at George Washington University.

  • Google Social Search. 'search for content in social networks in real-time and provides deep analytics data. Users can search without logging in for publicly posted information on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion and Vimeo.'

  • The NZ National Library is Archiving twitter about Covid19 in New Zealand.

Edit page
    
Add paper Cornell note Whiteboard Recorder Download Close
PIP mode