Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Introduction
Twitter
®
1
is a massive social networking site tuned towards fast communication.
More than 140 million active users publish over 400 million 140-character “Tweets”
every day.
2
Twitter's speed and ease of publication have made it an important
communication medium for people from all walks of life. Twitter has played
a prominent role in socio-political events, such as the Arab Spring
3
and the
Occupy Wall Street movement.
4
Twitter has also been used to post damage reports
and disaster preparedness information during large natural disasters, such as the
Hurricane Sandy.
This topic is for the reader who is interested in understanding the basics of
collecting, storing, and analyzing Twitter data. The first half of this topic discusses
collection and storage of data. It starts by discussing how to collect Twitter data,
looking at the free APIs provided by Twitter. We then goes on to discuss how to store
this data for use in real-time applications. The second half is focused on analysis.
Here, we focus on common measures and algorithms that are used to analyze social
media data. We finish the analysis by discussing visual analytics, an approach which
helps humans inspect the data through intuitive visualizations.
1.1
Main Takeaways from This Topic
This topic provides hands-on introduction to the collection and analysis of Twitter
data. No knowledge of data analysis, or social network analysis is presumed. For
all the concepts discussed in this topic, we will provide in-depth description of the
underlying assumptions and explain via construction of examples. The reader will
