Accessing and using social media data for research has gained popularity over the last decade. There are a number of online courses through O'Reilly Learning where you can learn how to mine social media data and links to these are provided below. However, please be aware that there are complex ethical and legal issues regarding using social media data for research that need to be considered alongside the technical skills needed to undertake the research. Please be aware that if you breach the platform terms and conditions of use that this is not a personal breach, the University will be held accountable for your use of the platform for research.
We recommend that before you undertake research using social media data that you (a) check with the platform terms and conditions about the use of data for research and (b) read the ethical guidance written by the University of Aberdeen to ensure that you have properly considered the ethical aspects of the research as well.
Please note that O'Reilly deletes content in December and June. If you are linking to courses on this platform we advise that you check that they are still running in January and July of each year.
You can search for more courses and resources for learning about social media analytics and web scraping on O'Reilly Learning. Enter 'social media' or 'webscraping' or 'mining' into the search bar on the home page. We recommend that you filter the results:
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Most of these courses use Python for web scraping so you will need a basic working knowledge of Python before taking these courses. There are courses on Python available through O'Reilly Learning.
This short video course shows you how to mine data from the Twitter API using Python on a Jupyter Notebook. You need to be confident in installing packages using Python before taking this course. There are numerous courses on Python available through O’Reilly Learning.
This short video course shows you how to mine data from the Twitter API using Python. You need to be confident in installing packages using Python before taking this course.
This short video course shows you how to mine data from Google + using Python and how to use the Python Natural Language Toolkit to analyse the similarity of texts. You need to have a basic working knowledge of Python before taking this course.
This short video course shows you how to mine data from webpages using Python and how to use the Python Natural Language Toolkit to analyse the similarity of texts. You need to have a basic working knowledge of Python before taking this course.
Instagram (45 mins)Instagram is one of the world's largest and most popular social networks with tens of millions of photos uploaded to its photo sharing platform every day. In this course, you'll learn the basics of connecting to the Instagram platform, explore its data, and analyze its content. First, you'll create a developer account and connect to the Instagram API to pull data. Then, you'll discover some techniques for analyzing that data before exploring some computer vision applications in a very accessible way. Learners must have their own Instagram profile with multiple image posts and basic proficiency in Python.
This short video course shows you how to mine data from GitHub using Python and then how to construct interest graphs to visualise and analyse the data that you retrieve. You need to have a basic working knowledge of Python before taking this course.
This short video course shows you how to mine data from LinkedIn using Python and then how to visualise the data and use geographical and cluster analysis to analyse the data. You need to have a basic working knowledge of Python before taking this course.
Most of these courses use Python for web scraping so you will need a basic working knowledge of Python before taking these courses. There are courses on Python available through O'Reilly Learning.
This video course introduces you to web scraping using Python. You will need a basic to intermediate knowledge of Python before taking this course. The course covers:
