[Air-L] additional suggestions for Twitter aggregating & analytic tools

[Maurice Vergeer]

Axel Bruns beat me to it. Yes, I would advise YourTwapperkeeper for data
collection as well. I've been using it for a while and am very pleased with
it. Things are indeed very well described in the First Monday manuscript:
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3937/3193

As for handling the data, I prefer to use SPSS. Yes, a statistical tool.
But I use it primarily to handle the data. Also I use SPSS to match
external data to the Twitter data. The data Twitter provides are of course
somewhat limited. However if one taps into external data sets one is able
to enrich Twitter data for more advanced analyses.

Also, SPSS has recently incorporated many text handling features to create
new variables based on text strings. It thus also allows for creating your
own metrics because - as Axel Bruns states - Twitter's metrices are biased.
See my blogpost:
http://blog.mauricevergeer.nl/2011/04/18/bias-in-twitter-api-measurements/

As for Big Data analysis: without going for the Big Data, the number of
observations already increases rapidly anyhow. See my presentation held at
WAPOR Amsterdam:
http://www.slideshare.net/maver/candidates-communication-patterns-on-twitter.
SPSS can easily handle large amounts of data.
As for large networks, I would recommend Pajek:
http://mrvar.fdv.uni-lj.si/pajek/. They even released another version Pajek
XXL for very very large networks.

Finally I know R the statstical / programming software also has a Twitter
package (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/twitteR/index.html). Have
tried it once, but because I am noy (yet) an R-expert haven't used it since
then. The advantage of using it in R would be that one cold stay within a
single software environment. R also has text (
http://gking.harvard.edu/readme) and several network analytical packages.

HTH
Maurice


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___________________________________________________________________
Maurice Vergeer
To contact me, see http://mauricevergeer.nl/node/5
To see my publications, see http://mauricevergeer.nl/node/1
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