[Air-L] Social media data collection

[Sugar, Benjamin N]

Hi Nicola,


Seems like some good programs have already been provided but to answer your other questions:


1) Is [it] possible to collect tweets in bulk related to specific key words or hashtags?

Absolutely.

2) Is there a specific programme that can assist me with this?

Some great resources mentioned, thank you, all!  Dr. Greenhalgh’s and Dr. Hamilton’s methods seem perfect. If you do not find an option that works for you, email me and I can walk you through Twarc which is listed on the blog post Dr. Shulman sent.  It’s as “simple” as typing sentences and pressing return, but it does use the terminal which is a little program-y.  It also requires a Mac (or Linux).

3) Is this permissible with Twitter's Ts & Cs?

Yes! Collection of bulk tweets for as long as you want using any of the Twitter API’s available are permitted.  The area which does have rules is the sharing of tweets post collection. You can share all of the full tweets with collaborators (including members of your lab).  When sharing them with others, although you can share the all of the tweets, you can't share each tweet in its entirety.  That is, you could share a file with all of the tweets you collected but only contains the tweet id, date, screen name and text fields.

4) Keyhole - has anybody used this before?

I have not but if you have the funding for a paid service, then go with that.  There are days I yearn to have something do the heavy lifting myself.