Computational Social Science, Digital Methods and Big Data in Political Science: Week 8

In week eight, we focus on extracting data on interaction networks between Twitter users from JSON files collected through Twitter’s API using Python. In a second step, we perform some simple description of the resulting network using the R package igraph. Kolaczyk & Csárdi (2014) offers an excellent introduction to the statistical description of networks while McKinney (2012) offers a very helpful primer on how to use Python for data manipulation.

Code Example Session 8

Mandatory Readings
Eric D. Kolaczyk & Gábor Csárdi (2014). “Descriptive Analysis of Network Graph Characteristics” Statistical Analysis of Network Data with R. Springer. (pp. 43-67)

Background Readings
Wes McKinney. [@wesmckinn]. (2012). Python for Data Analysis. O’Reilly.