smsociety15

As social creatures, our online lives just like our offline lives are intertwined with others within a wide variety of social networks. Each retweet on Twitter, comment on a blog or link to a Youtube video explicitly or implicitly connects one online participant to another and contributes to the formation of various information and social networks. Once discovered, these networks can provide researchers with an effective mechanism for identifying and studying collaborative processes within any online community. However, collecting information about online networks using traditional methods such as surveys can be very time consuming and expensive. This workshop will explore automated ways to discover and analyze communication networks from social media data. As part of the workshop, participants will learn how to use Netlytic (http://netlytic.org), a cloud-based text and social networks analyzer to collect, analyze and visualize publicly available online conversations from social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The workshop will also show how to export communication networks discovered by Netlytic in order to conduct Social Network Analysis (SNA) and create videos showing changes in networks over time using igraph, a popular SNA library in R.

Pre-Workshop Prep: 

• Create an account for Netlytic (http://netlytic.org)
  • Installation: No installation is required; please make sure that you have a web browser installed on your laptop (Chrome or Firefox preferred)

• Create a Twitter account for data collection (you can use an existing account)

• Download and install Package R
  • https://cran.r-project.org/
  • once R is installed, please also install a library called “igraph”  by running the following command inside R:

install.packages("igraph")

• Download and install FFmpeg - software to create an MP4 video
  • Download the latest “static build” version of FFmpeg (32bit or 64bit) from http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/
  • Note: To unpack the downloaded file, you can use  PeaZIP http://www.peazip.org/
  • Unpack and run the “ff-prompt” file to install FFmpeg.

  If you are a Mac user:

  -       Install/Update Xcode

  -       Download FFmpeg Binary from http://ffmpegmac.net

           -       Follow the download instructions from http://www.renevolution.com/how-to-install-ffmpeg-on-mac-os-x/

• Download and install a popular video player VLC
  • https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html#download

• Create a new folder on your Desktop called “SMS15net” where you will keep all of the files related to this workshop. Within this folder, create the following subfolders: “img” and “net”