Analyzing social media with Python and other tools (1/4)

Good morning!

Enjoy your coﬀee and install
Putty and NotepadPlus via "Software Maintance/Application
Catalgue". And the Pattern-package (see my e-mail). Thanks.

Big Data? What are we talking about?

The process: collect, store, analyze

Python

Questions?

Hands-on-Workshop
Big (Twitter) Data
Damian Trilling
d.c.trilling@uva.nl
@damian0604
www.damiantrilling.net
Afdeling Communicatiewetenschap
Universiteit van Amsterdam

30 January 2014
9.30
#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

The next one and a half days
You’ll hear about
• Collecting social media data via APIs, RSS and scraping (and

the tools for it)
• Technical infrastructure (via surfsara)
• Python
• Sentiment analysis
• Automated coding
• Frequencies and other statistics
• Social network analysis with Gephi
• ...

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

In this session (1/4):
1 Big Data? What are we talking about?

Exploring the ﬁeld
Some examples
2 The process: collect, store, analyze

A scheme
Our implementation
3 Python

What it is
When to use it
When not to use it
4 Questions?

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?


What’s big data?
What are we talking about?

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?


Today, it’s a hands-on workshop, so let’s keep this important (!)
discussion for later.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?



So, no deﬁnition, but some brief thoughts
• Existing data ( = experiments or surveys)
• Too big to code manually
• Too big to handle with normal tools
• New research questions
• Call to revisit the relationship between theory and empirical

research

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?


Today, . . .
• we are not going to talk about REALLY BIG data,
• but we will have some exercises on datasets a normal

computer can handle

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?


Today, . . .
• we are not going to talk about REALLY BIG data,
• but we will have some exercises on datasets a normal

computer can handle

Tomorrow, . . .
• we will also learn about scaling up these techniques
• SurfSARA provides infrastructure for this

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?



Some sources
• Social Network Sites
• RSS-feeds
• Databases
• Scraping text from the web
• ...

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?


It’s out there!
You only have to collect it.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?


But why should we care?
We can answer new questions
• Find needles in haystacks
• Identify networks, co-word analysis, linguistic analysis, . . .
• Verify our theories in larger datasets

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?


But why should we care?
We can answer new questions
• Find needles in haystacks
• Identify networks, co-word analysis, linguistic analysis, . . .
• Verify our theories in larger datasets

It makes sense
• There are things that computers are simply better at than

humans, e.g. in counting things
• Having human coders look for words in texts is like calculating

a regression analysis by hand

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

Some examples

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

A recent master thesis

The needle in the haystack

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples


Imagine you want to analyze some very rare content.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples


Imagine you want to analyze some very rare content.
Normal sampling won’t work, that’s for sure.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

So you’d better collect everything ﬁrst

Getting all news coverage from Dutch news sites

Pöll, B. (2013). Social media: new sources, new profession? A content analysis of the use of social media as a
source for journalists in online news articles. Master Thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples


1

Collect all articles from nine news sites during a period of two
months, resulting in a database with 74.000 articles.


#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples


1


2

Filter articles containing speciﬁc keywords.


#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples


1


2

Filter articles containing speciﬁc keywords.

3

Those 292 articles where then manually coded.


#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

It’s just one line of code!

url.txt
http://www.gmx.at/themen/wissen/mensch/108g5xi-baeuerlich-schiefe-zaehne
http://www.gmx.at/themen/unterhaltung/klatsch-tratsch/408g740-fuermannbittet-um-verzeihung
http://www.gmx.at/themen/nachrichten/aufruhr-arabien/268g70u-regierungwill-zuruecktreten
http://www.gmx.at/themen/nachrichten/panorama/828g54y-neues-zur-klagegegen-republik
http://www.gmx.at/themen/nachrichten/panorama/968g72s-millionstrafewegen-oelpest
http://www.gmx.at/themen/unterhaltung/klatsch-tratsch/368g6yc-keinbabybauch-nur-fast-food
...
...
...

#bigdata

wget-commando
wget -i urls.txt

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

A recent bachelor thesis

Tone in tweets

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples


Tone in tweets
Imagine you want to know something about someone’s behavior on
twitter. Or how a speciﬁc topic is discussed on Twitter.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples


Tone in tweets
Imagine you want to know something about someone’s behavior on
twitter. Or how a speciﬁc topic is discussed on Twitter.
Do you really want to go through thousands of tweets by hand?

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

So you’d better think about automating your coding
Finding out how negative or positive politicians are towards
their opponents

Schut, L. (2013). Verenigde Staten vs. Verenigd Koningrijk: Een automatische inhoudsanalyse naar verklarende
factoren voor het gebruik van positive campaigning en negative campaigning door vooraanstaande politici en
politieke partijen op Twitter. Bachelor Thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

their opponents
The student took lists with positive and negative words and made
additional ones with a politician’s opponents.


#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

their opponents
She used a Python-script to check which type of words was used to
refer to opponents.


#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

their opponents
She used a Python-script to check which type of words was used to
refer to opponents.
For further analysis, the results where imported in SPSS.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

Frame adoption on Twitter

Which phrases used by Merkel and Steinbrück on TV make it
to the #tvduell discussion on Twitter?
Identify frequently used words in the transcript of the debate and
in tweets.
Find co-occurrances.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Some examples

Frame adoption on Twitter

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

A scheme

A scheme

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

datacollection.followthenews-uva.cloudlet.sara.nl

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

yourTwapperkeeper
Continuosly calls the Twitter-API and saves all
tweets containing speciﬁc hashtags to a
mySQL-database.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

yourTwapperkeeper
mySQL-database.

rsshond
Calls the RSS-feeds of news sites 1x/hour,
saves title, time, header, and teaser of all new
articles into a CSV-table, follows the link to
the full text and downloads them.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

yourTwapperkeeper
mySQL-database.

rsshond
Calls the RSS-feeds of news sites 1x/hour,
saves title, time, header, and teaser of all new
articles into a CSV-table, follows the link to
the full text and downloads them.

snapshot
Visits some URLs every 4x/day and downloads
them.
#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

How to access the collected data?

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

Apache-webserver
Download the data from
http://datacollection.
followthenews-uva.cloudlet.sara.nl.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

Apache-webserver

SSH (scp)
Transfer data directly to your computer or
another server (like
speeltuin.followthenews-uva.cloudlet.sara.nl)

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Our implementation

Apache-webserver

SSH (scp)
Transfer data directly to your computer or
another server (like
speeltuin.followthenews-uva.cloudlet.sara.nl)

Beehub
Connect the server to beehub, which can be
mounted like the "p-schijf" or accessed online.
#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

Python

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

One tool to rule them all?

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is


Of course there are ready-made tool for some of the questions we
want to answer. But for many, there isn’t. Python oﬀers us the
possibility to build exactly the tool we need.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is


Of course there are ready-made tool for some of the questions we
want to answer. But for many, there isn’t. Python oﬀers us the
possibility to build exactly the tool we need.

fun!

#bigdata

And it’s

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

What is Python?
It is a programming language
• It is ﬂexible. You can use it for (in principle) any kind of data
• There are virtually no limits regarding the amount of data to

process
• You can run it on every platform

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

What is Python?

process
• And yet it is easy to learn!

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

What is Python?

process
• And yet it is easy to learn!

It is widely used for content analysis
• Many online ressources and toolkits
• Books about NLP and Web Scraping with Python

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

You do not have to become a
programmer.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

programmer. If you know how to
write SPSS or STATA syntax, you
will understand Python.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

(But if you have ever had contact with whatever programming language,
it helps.)

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

(But if you have ever had contact with whatever programming language,

It’s enough if you can read and
modify the code.
it helps.)

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

Think of the following task

RQ: What are the diﬀerences in terms of actors mentioned
between Israeli and Palestinian news coverage?

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is


1

#bigdata

The data structure: You have a folder with articles

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is


1
2

#bigdata

The desired output: You want a table with the ﬁle names and
a column per actor, counting how often they are mentioned

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is


1
2

The desired output: You want a table with the ﬁle names and
a column per actor, counting how often they are mentioned

3

#bigdata


A typical task for a short Python script!

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

You need someting like this:
for every file in folder:
read the file
count actors
add new row to table with filename and actor counts
save table
(such a notation is called pseudo-code)

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

mypath ="C:UsersRicardaDocumentsArtikelen"
regex54 = re.compile(r’Israel.*[minister|politician.*|[Aa]uthorit’)
filename_list=[]
matchcount54=0
matchcount54_list=[]
onlyfiles = [ f for f in listdir(mypath) if isfile(join(mypath,f)) ]
for f in onlyfiles:
matchcount54=0
artikel=open(join(mypath,f),"r")
for line in artikel:
matches54 = regex54.findall(line)
for word in matches54:
matchcount54=matchcount54+1
filename_list.append(f)
matchcount54_list.append(matchcount54)
artikel.close()
output=zip(filename_list,matchcount54_list)
writer = csv.writer(open("overzichtstabel.csv", ’wb’))
writer.writerows(output)
#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

What it is

This is not too diﬀerent from a script Jelle uses for his dissertation.
The main diﬀerence: He doesn’t code regular expressions, but
calculates document similarity.
slides-jelle.pdf

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When to use it

When to use Python

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When to use it

1st group of tasks

Highly repetitive tasks
Simple tasks (counting things, comparing texts, . . . ) that can be
described in a formalized way. Saves time even with few cases, but
there is virtually no size limit.
Example: Retweets start with RT, optionally followed by a space,
and some letters. So it is very easy to identify them automatically

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When to use it

2nd group of tasks

Task for which speciﬁc Python modules exist
There are thousands of modules suitable for text analysis. You
basically only have to write code for data input and output.
Example: Sentiment analysis

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When to use it

3rd group of tasks

API’s, RSS, webscraping . . .
You can use Python if you want to collect and store information.
Example: Collecting bio’s of Twitter users, scraping the web (data
journalism!), downloading Facebook data

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When not to use it

When not to use Python

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When not to use it

Maybe you do not need to write a Python script . . .

. . . when there are already suitable tools available.
Sometimes, the perfect ready-made tool already exists.

Example: Axel Bruns’ awk-scripts for Twitter analysis
(www. mappingonlinepublics. net ). If I had to write such a tool, I’d do it in
Python, but hey, he did it already with awk and it works.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When not to use it

Maybe you do not need to write a Python script . . .

. . . when there are already suitable tools available.
Sometimes, the perfect ready-made tool already exists.
But still, sometimes it is more eﬃcient to write something that does exactly
what you want
Example: Axel Bruns’ awk-scripts for Twitter analysis
(www. mappingonlinepublics. net ). If I had to write such a tool, I’d do it in
Python, but hey, he did it already with awk and it works.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When not to use it

And, let’s face it,. . .

. . . we are no programmers.
So maybe, some tasks are too complex for us to program ourselves.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When not to use it

And, let’s face it,. . .

. . . we are no programmers.
So maybe, some tasks are too complex for us to program ourselves.
But there is a huge online community that helps you.

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When not to use it

Recap
1 Big Data? What are we talking about?

Some examples
2 The process: collect, store, analyze

A scheme
Our implementation
3 Python

What it is
When to use it
When not to use it
4 Questions?

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

When not to use it

After the break

Hand’s on! Exploring a basic Python script

#bigdata

Damian Trilling



Python

Questions?

Vragen of opmerkingen?

Damian Trilling
d.c.trilling@uva.nl
@damian0604
www.damiantrilling.net
#bigdata

Damian Trilling

Analyzing social media with Python and other tools (1/4)

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