CreateActorNetwork: Note: this function is DEPRECATED and will be removed in a...
In SocialMediaLab: Tools for Collecting Social Media Data and Generating Networks for Analysis

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Note Author(s) See Also Examples

Create 'actor' networks from social media data

1	CreateActorNetwork(x, writeToFile)

`x`	a data frame of class `dataSource`. For Twitter data, it is also possible to provide a list of data frames (i.e. data frames that inherit class `dataSource` and `twitter`). Only lists of Twitter data frames are supported at this time. If a list of data frames is provided, then the function binds these row-wise and computes over the entire data set.
`writeToFile`	logical. If `TRUE` then the network is saved to file in current working directory (GRAPHML format), with filename denoting the current date/time and the type of network.

This function creates a unimodal 'actor' network from social media data (i.e. from data frames of class dataSource, or for Twitter data it is also possible to provide a *list* of data frames). In this actor network, edges represent relationships between actors of the same type (e.g. interactions between Twitter users). For example, with Twitter data an interaction is defined as a 'mention' or 'reply' or 'retweet' from user i to user j, given 'tweet' m. With YouTube comments, an interaction is defined as a 'reply' or 'mention' from user i to user j, given 'comment' m.

This function creates a (weighted and directed) unimodal 'actor' network from a data frame of class dataSource (which are created using the 'CollectData' family of functions in the SocialMediaLab package), or a *list* of Twitter data frames collected using CollectDataTwitter function.

The resulting network is an igraph graph object. This graph object is unimodal because edges represent relationships between vertices of the same type (read: 'actors'), such as replies/retweets/mentions between Twitter users. Edges are directed and weighted (e.g. if user i has replied n times to user j, then the weight of this directed edge equals n).

An igraph graph object, with directed and weighted edges.

Not all data sources in SocialMediaLab can be used for creating actor networks.

Currently supported data sources are:

- YouTube - Twitter

Other data sources (e.g. Facebook) will be implemented in the future. The user is notified if they try to create actor networks for incompatible data sources.

For Twitter data, actor networks can be created from multiple data frames (i.e. datasets collected individually using CollectDataTwitter). Simply create a list of the data frames that you wish to create a network from. For example, myList <- list(myTwitterData1, myTwitterData2, myTwitterData3).

Timothy Graham <timothy.graham3@uq.net.au> & Robert Ackland <robert.ackland@anu.edu.au>

See CollectDataYoutube and CollectDataTwitter to collect data sources for creating actor networks in SocialMediaLab.

## Not run: 
  ## This example shows how to collect YouTube comments data and create an actor network

  # Use your own Google Developer API Key here:
  myApiKey <- "1234567890"

  # Authenticate with the Google API
  apiKeyYoutube <- AuthenticateWithYoutubeAPI(apiKeyYoutube=myApiKey)

  # Generate a vector of YouTube video IDs to collect data from
  # (or use the function `GetYoutubeVideoIDs` to automatically
  # generate from a plain text file of video URLs)
  videoIDs <- c("W2GZFeYGU3s","mL27TAJGlWc")

  # Collect the data using function `CollectDataYoutube`
  myYoutubeData <- CollectDataYoutube(videoIDs,apiKeyYoutube,writeToFile=FALSE)

  # Create an 'actor' network using the function `CreateActorNetwork`
  g_actor_youtube <- CreateActorNetwork(myYoutubeData)

  # Description of actor network
  g_actor_youtube

## End(Not run)