[Air-L] Social media data collection

[Nicola Langdon]

Dear all,

I am a post-doc researcher based at the University of Plymouth. I am investigating the media framing of renewable energy and would like to capture the conversations occurring about this through social media, particularly Twitter.

My previous experience with this has been limited to qualitative analysis via a manual retrieval of tweets via Twitter's advanced search (obviously small in number compared to large-scale mining) and coding this in NVivo.

I have heard of many third-party sites that previously collected tweets in bulk via Twitter's API, (I think!) (for example Twapperkeeper and I have previously used the free element of Topsy) but many of these seem to no longer be in existence which has led me to query whether this is compliant with Twitter's user policies.

I know there have been many conversations around this before but can anybody clarify whether it is possible to collect Tweets in bulk related to specific key words or hashtags? And if so, is there a specific programme that can assist me with this? For example, can I set something up to capture the tweets occurring using specific key words/hashtags over a few months? And is this permissible with Twitter's Ts & Cs?

I am currently exploring the possibility of using Keyhole - has anybody used this before?

I know there have been numerous similar enquiries so please forgive me for asking again. I do not know very much about computer programming and have never used R or Python so I would appreciate if somebody can explain this to me without too much technical terminology if possible!

With thanks,
Nicola

Dr Nicola Langdon
Researcher -Media Framing of Deep Geothermal Energy
Sustainable Earth Institute
Room 101, 1 Kirkby Place,
Plymouth,
PL4 8AA

Tel: +44 (0)1752 585617
Twitter: @nicolaklangdon

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