Tutorial: How to Use Twitter Data in the Social Sciences

This weekend, I was invited to give a tutorial on how to use Twitter data in the social science at the POLNET+ summer academy at the University of Konstanz. In my two presentations, I focused on conceptual issues of dealing with digital trace data and some fundamentals in collecting data from Twitter’s API.

The first presentation focuses on a series of conceptual issues in working with digital trace data that unfortunately often tend to get ignored by researchers and commentators.

In the second presentation, I introduced the participants to the script-set and tutorial “A Tutorial for Using Twitter Data in the Social Sciences: Data Collection, Preparation, and Analysis” written by Pascal Jürgens and me.

In case you want to retrace the steps of the course, I uploaded the slides for both talks and the code examples used during the course.

Slides:
Using Digital Trace Data in the Social Sciences: Challenges and Opportunities
Using Digital Trace Data in the Social Sciences: Twitter as Example (Tutorial)

Code:
polnet Twiter tutorial script

If you want to delve deeper into the conceptual issues addressed in the first talk have a look at the following publications.

Andreas Jungherr, Harald Schoen, and Pascal Jürgens. 2016. The mediation of politics through Twitter: An analysis of messages posted during the campaign for the German federal election 2013. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 21(1): 50-68. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12143

Andreas Jungherr, Harald Schoen, Oliver Posegga, and Pascal Jürgens. 2016. Digital Trace Data in the Study of Public Opinion: An Indicator of Attention Toward Politics Rather Than Political Support. Social Science Computer Review. (Online First). doi: 10.1177/0894439316631043

Andreas Jungherr. 2015. Analyzing Political Communication with Digital Trace Data: The Role of Twitter Messages in Social Science Research. Cham: Springer.

If you want to follow us deeper into the rabbit hole of Twitter-based research have a look at Pascal’s and my tutorial “A Tutorial for Using Twitter Data in the Social Sciences: Data Collection, Preparation, and Analysis“. The tutorial comes with a handy set of scripts designed to help you in working with Twitter data.

To get an idea on questions that could be addressed using Twitter data, have a look at this recent literature review on research focusing on Twitter’s use in election campaigns:

Andreas Jungherr. 2016. Twitter Use in Election Campaigns: A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 13(1): 72-91. doi: 10.1080/19331681.2015.1132401