SocialMediaLab-package: Collection and network analysis of social media data

Description Details Author(s)

Description

The goal of the SocialMediaLab package is to provide a suite of easy-to-use tools for collecting data from social media sources (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube) and generating different types of networks suited to Social Network Analysis (SNA) and text analytics. It offers tools to create unimodal, multimodal, semantic, and dynamic networks. It draws on excellent packages such as twitteR, instaR, Rfacebook, and igraph in order to provide an integrated 'work flow' for collecting different types of social media data and creating different types of networks out of these data. Creating networks from social media data is often non-trivial and time consuming. This package simplifies such tasks so users can focus on analysis.

Details

SocialMediaLab uses a straightforward S3 class system. Data collected with this package produces data.table objects (extension of class data.frame), which are assigned the class dataSource. Additionally, dataSource objects are assigned a class identifying the source of data, e.g. facebook or youtube. In this way, dataSource objects are fast, easy to work with, and can be used as input to easily construct different types of networks. For example, the function Collect can be used to collect Twitter data, which is then 'piped' to the Create function, resulting in a network (an igraph object) that is ready for analysis.

Author(s)

Timothy Graham & Robert Ackland, with contribution from Chung-hong Chan

Maintainer: Timothy Graham <timothy.graham3@uq.net.au>


SocialMediaLab documentation built on May 29, 2017, 9:41 p.m.