SocialMediaLab-package: Collection and network analysis of social media data
Description
The goal of the SocialMediaLab package is to provide a suite of easy-to-use
tools for collecting data from social media sources (Instagram, Facebook,
Twitter, and Youtube) and generating different types of networks suited to
Social Network Analysis (SNA) and text analytics. It offers tools to create
unimodal, multimodal, semantic, and dynamic networks. It draws on excellent
packages such as twitteR, instaR, Rfacebook, and
igraph in order to provide an integrated 'work flow' for collecting
different types of social media data and creating different types of
networks out of these data. Creating networks from social media data is
often non-trivial and time consuming. This package simplifies such tasks so
users can focus on analysis.Details
SocialMediaLab uses a straightforward S3 class system. Data collected with
this package produces data.table objects (extension of class
data.frame), which are assigned the class dataSource.
Additionally, dataSource objects are assigned a class identifying the
source of data, e.g. facebook or youtube. In this way,
dataSource objects are fast, easy to work with, and can be used as
input to easily construct different types of networks. For example, the
function Collect can be used to collect Twitter data, which is
then 'piped' to the Create function, resulting in a network
(an igraph object) that is ready for analysis.