README.md

In SMAPPNYU/mediascores: News-sharing Ideology from Social Media Link Data

mediascores: News-sharing Ideology from Social Media Link Data

About

This package provides an R implementation of a statistical model for news media link data (URLs) on social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). The goal of the method is to estimate:

1. the news-sharing ideology of politicians and ordinary users on social media
2. the ideology of the content that they share online

Installation

The development version of the mediascores library can be installed in R with the following:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("SMAPPNYU/mediascores")

Note: a version of the mediascores library will also be made available later on CRAN.

Quick start guide

To get started, your data need to be formatted as a user-domain count matrix, whereby rows represent individual social media users and columns represent the news media (sub)domains that users share (e.g. nytimes.com). Each cell in the matrix therefore represents the number of times that a given user (row) shared a given domain (columns).

An example of such data (news domains tweeted by Members of Congress) are included in the library and can be loaded as follows:

library(mediascores)
data(MOC115)

The default model can be fit to the data as follows:

# Note: This model will take a few hours to fit
fitted_model <- mediascores(Y = MOC115[, 7:151], group = MOC115$group,
                            anchors = c(1, 2),
                            chains = 4, cores = 4,
                            warmup = 750, iter = 1500)

Vignette

A vignette describing the library in greater detail—the model, model-fitting, convergence, and extracting quantities of interest—is available here.

SMAPPNYU/mediascores documentation built on May 18, 2019, 1:30 p.m.