rtweet: Collecting Twitter Data

R package for collecting Twitter data via Twitter's REST and stream API's.

Key features

• UPDATE: Most functions now return data tables for both tweets and users. So, if you search for tweets, you also get data for the users responsible for the returned tweets. If you look up users, you also get the most recent tweet for each user.

• Gather tweet data by searching past tweets search_tweets(), streaming live tweets stream_tweets(), or collecting tweets from a user's timeline get_timeline(). Easily return data on thousands of tweets at a time.

• Gather user data by looking up Twitter users lookup_users(). Easily return data on thousands of users.

• Gather followers and friends data by collecting the ids of accounts following a user get_followers() or the ids of accounts followed by a user get_friends().

• Organized and easily translatable data formats. Functions return tibble data tables ready for data analysis.

• Tweet data functions return not only text of tweets, but a host of other variables (up t 27 columns), including the number of times a tweet has been retweeted (retweet_count) and favorited (favorite_count). To gauge user interactions, there are also seperate variables that identify replies by source tweet (in_reply_to_status_id_str) and by source user ID (in_reply_to_status_id_str). Variables also indicate whether the tweet quotes another tweet (is_quote_status), and, if so, the quoted tweet ID (quoted_status_id_str).

Install

To get the current released version from CRAN:

install.packages("rtweet")
library(rtweet)

To get the current development version from github:

if (packageVersion("devtools") < 1.6) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_github("mkearney/rtweet")

Getting started

• Obtaining and using access tokens (a guide to gaining authorization to use Twitter's APIs): https://github.com/mkearney/rtweet/blob/master/vignettes/tokens.md

• Collecting and analyzing tweets using the search_tweets() function: https://github.com/mkearney/rtweet/blob/master/vignettes/search_tweets.md

Package description

More technical description: An implementation of calls designed to extract and organize Twitter data via Twitter's REST and stream API's. Functions formulate GET and POST requests and convert response objects to more user friendly structures, e.g., data frames or lists. Specific consideration is given to functions designed to return tweets, friends, and followers.

Contact

Email me at mkearney@ku.edu

To Do List

• API Functions

  • get_retweeters() Retrieve users retweeting a status (in progress)
  • list_users() Retrieve users in list
  • search_users() Search for users by name, interest, etc.

• Vignettes

  • Guide to stream_tweets()
  • Guide to get_friends() and get_followers()

• Documentation

  • Search query syntax
  • Stream syntax i.e., filter vs tracking vs location