[Air-L] Searching Instagram/Twitter by keyword and narrowing to specific focus

Shulman, Stu stu at texifter.com
Thu Mar 28 05:43:19 PDT 2019


-searching/scraping by geography
*>> no longer possible (academic access to historical premium Twitter data
with geo enhancements) and it never really was unless you were willing to
use a non-random, non-representative samples derived from the less than 1%
of Twitter users who manually opt in to share geolocation data. I agree
there are other ways to impute location from other elements in the metadata
(sometimes, for example, the author bio) but there is a huge error rate and
also quite incomplete data.*

-specifying searches according to number of followers
*>> This was formerly done in advance through historical metadata filters
and is currently done now after the data is collected. Here the question
is, do you mean at the time of collection or the time of analysis. If you
mean time of collection, it is in the metadata. If you mean at the time of
analysis, you need to be viewing the Tweets in the Twitter display to see
the live count. Once you put Tweets in a spreadsheet or any other platform
not connected to the Twitter display, you kill the connection to the
mothership, and all the images, embeds, threads, live RT counts, and live
likes, etc. In other words, you kill the Twitter data rendering it into a
degraded post-Tweet **detritus**, and no longer the living, breathing
network property we are all supposed to be interested in.*

- Keyhole's current price range of $370/month
*>> That's a lot. DiscoverText starts at $24/month for students and
$49/month for faculty.*




On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 5:46 AM Aysenur Ataman <aataman at gradcenter.cuny.edu>
wrote:

> Dear Natalie,
>
> I do not know any tool that would allow you to combine the two parameters
> (hashtag and geographical location) when searching for posts on Instagram.
> I collected data pre Dec 1st 2018 API change via Netlytic and am not sure
> Netlytic' access is still valid but I do recommend checking that out.
>
> Steps I recommend your friend takes:
>
> 1) It is very crucial to think carefully about what hashtag will be useful
> for your research. Better it is not a BIG hashtag.
>
> 2) Collect metadata using the hashtag(s) and dates as parameters.
>
> 3) Use longitude-latitude to detect locations yourself. Will be much more
> reliable that way.
>
> I played with scraping the number of followers after these steps and see
> if I can come up with a formula to make sense of number of likes and
> comments under each post but then I decided with the bots and fake accounts
> no finding will be reliable. So I gave up… If anyone has thoughts and
> solutions for that I would be glad to hear.
>
> Best,
> Ayşenur
>
> _____________________________________________
> Ayşenur Benevento
> Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
> Abdullah Gül University
> On 28 Mar 2019 05:38 +0300, Natalie Rock <drnatalierock at gmail.com>, wrote:
> Community:
>
> This is a question from a colleague. Its out of my wheelhouse but probably
> not yours!
>
> He is interested in tracking dialogue on Twitter and Instagram about
> renewable energy, especially in light of the Green New Deal, but with the
> search focused on change makers (i.e. those over a certain number of
> followers).
>
> He has set up an account with Keyhole but their searches are not useful.
> Keyhole doesn't allow you to specify the search by geography; nor does it
> allow you to indicate which profiles to search. When he searches "renewable
> energy" (keyword and hashtag) he gets hundreds of thousands of returns, but
> many are unrelated to his focus. So, do you know a platform that enables:
>
> -searching/scraping by geography
> -specifying searches according to number of followers
>
> and which is the same or below Keyhole's current price range of $370/month?
>
> Thank you!
> Natalie
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-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Cell: 413-992-8513
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartwshulman



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