Analyzing Twitter data

1. Analyzing Twitter Data

Welcome to analyzing social media data with Python. I'm Alex Hanna and I'm a Computational Social Scientist. In this course, we're going to analyze Twitter data using Python. There are millions of tweets created every day from across the entire world, in many different languages. In this course, we're going to learn how to collect Twitter data, how to process Twitter text, how to analyze Twitter networks, and how to map Twitter data geographically. Let's get started!

2. Why Analyze Twitter Data?

Twitter is one of the largest social networking sites in operation right now. While Twitter is far from a comprehensive record of the public conversation, it can help to provide insight into popular trends and important cultural and political moments. If you're a data scientist in industry, analyzing Twitter can be used for tasks such as marketing or product analysis.

3. Why Analyze Twitter Data?

If you're a computational social scientist, Twitter can be used as a measure of public opinion on important political or social topics. Twitter data has been used to analyze political polarization, public opinion of world leaders, and the spread of protest movements.

4. What you can't analyze

Of course, you can't access all of what happens on Twitter. It may seem obvious to say, but you can only collect information on what people say, not who is watching passively. Twitter collects data on this internally but doesn't release it for analysis. If you're looking to use free tools for doing your analysis, you're also limited in two important ways. First, you can't collect data from the past. If you wanted data on your company from one year ago and you didn't collect it at the time, you're out of luck. Second, Twitter only offers a sample of their data for free, what they say is a 1% sample.

5. What you can analyze

However, a 1% sample of Twitter is still on the order of a few million tweets a day. In each of those tweets, you get a lot of information: the text of the tweet, user profile information -- like the number of followers and followees the user has -- geolocation, and other extras. You also get all of that information for retweets and quoted tweets.

6. Let's review!

We'll get into how to access all of that information in a second. Let's review what you can do with Twitter data.

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