A suite of tools for collecting and constructing networks from social media data. Provides easy-to-use functions for collecting data across popular platforms (Twitter, YouTube and Reddit) and generating different types of networks for analysis.
vosonSML
is an R package that provides a suite of tools for collecting and constructing networks from social media data. It provides easy-to-use functions for collecting data across popular platforms and generating different types of networks for analysis.
vosonSML
is the SocialMediaLab
package, renamed. We decided that SocialMediaLab
was a bit too generic and also we wanted to indicate the connection to the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab, where this package was conceived and created.
vosonSML
was created by Timothy Graham and Robert Ackland, with major contributions by Chung-hong Chan and Bryan Gertzel.
vosonSML
currently features the collection of data and generation of networks from twitter
, youtube
and reddit
.
Unfortunately we are no longer able to maintain facebook
and instagram
collection, however these features will still be available in releases prior to version 0.25.0
.
Install the current version from Github:
# requires the 'devtools' package (or alternatively 'remotes')library(devtools) # optionally add the parameter 'dependencies = TRUE' to install package dependenciesdevtools::install_github("vosonlab/vosonSML")
Install vosonSML from CRAN:
install.packages("vosonSML", dependencies = TRUE)
Note about previous releases: The vosonSML package was previously in a subdirectory, so if you wish to install versions prior to 0.26
please remember to include the subdir
parameter.
devtools::install_github("vosonlab/[email protected]", subdir = "vosonSML")
The following usage examples will provide a great introduction to using vosonSML
. There are also several "how to" guides, including an "Absolute Beginners Guide to vosonSML" tutorial aimed at people with little or no programming experience on the vosonSML page of the VOSON website.
The process of authentication, data collection and creating social network in vosonSML is expressed with the three verb functions: Authenticate, Collect and Create. The following are some examples:
library(magrittr)library(vosonSML) # Twitter Example # Authenticate with twitter, Collect 100 tweets for the '#auspol' hashtag and Create an actor and # semantic networkmyKeys <- list(appName = "vosonSML", apiKey = "xxxxxxxxxxxx", apiSecret = "xxxxxxxxxxxx", accessToken = "xxxxxxxxxxxx", accessTokenSecret = "xxxxxxxxxxxx") twitterAuth <- Authenticate("twitter", appName = myKeys$appName, apiKey = myKeys$apiKey, apiSecret = myKeys$apiSecret, accessToken = myKeys$accessToken, accessTokenSecret = myKeys$accessTokenSecret, useCachedToken = TRUE) twitterData <- twitterAuth %>% Collect(searchTerm = "#auspol", searchType = "recent", numTweets = 100, includeRetweets = FALSE, retryOnRateLimit = TRUE, writeToFile = TRUE, verbose = TRUE) actorNetwork <- twitterData %>% Create("actor", writeToFile = TRUE, verbose = TRUE) actorGraph <- actorNetwork$graph # igraph network graph # Optional step to add additional twitter user info to actor network graph as node attributes actorNetWithUserAttr <- AddUserData.twitter(twitterData, actorNetwork, lookupUsers = TRUE, twitterAuth = twitterAuth, writeToFile = TRUE) actorGraphWithUserAttr <- actorNetWithUserAttr$graph # igraph network graph semanticNetwork <- twitterData %>% Create("semantic", writeToFile = TRUE) # Youtube Example # Authenticate with youtube, Collect comment data from videos and then Create an actor networkmyYoutubeAPIKey = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" myYoutubeVideoIds <- GetYoutubeVideoIDs(c("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx", "https://youtu.be/xxxxxxxx")) actorNetwork <- Authenticate("youtube", apiKey = myYoutubeAPIKey) %>% Collect(videoIDs = myYoutubeVideoIds) %>% Create("actor", writeToFile = TRUE) # Reddit Example ## Collect reddit comment threads and Create an actor network with comment text as edge attributemyThreadUrls <- c("https://www.reddit.com/r/xxxxxx/comments/xxxxxx/x_xxxx_xxxxxxxxx/") actorNetwork <- Authenticate("reddit") %>% Collect(threadUrls = myThreadUrls, waitTime = 5) %>% Create("actor", includeTextData = TRUE, writeToFile = TRUE)
For more detailed information and examples, please refer to the function Reference page.
This package would not be possible without key packages by other authors in the R community, particularly: igraph, rtweet, RedditExtractoR, data.table, tm, magrittr, httr and dplyr.
Create.actor.reddit
that were incorrectly creating edges between
top-level commentors and thread authors from different threads. These bugs were only
observable in when collecting multiple reddit threads.reddit
collection. Removed the progress bar and added a table
of results summarising the number of comments collected for each thread.twitter
collection output the users twitter API
reset time.Create.actor.twitter
and Create.bimodal.twitter
in which the vertices
dataframe provided to the graph_from_data_frame
function as a contained duplicate names
raising an error.roxygen
documentation and examples for all package functions.Authenticate
, Collect
and Create
S3 methods to implement function routing
based on object class names.pkgdown
web site for github hosted package documentation.twitteR
twitter collection implementation with the rtweet
package.twitter
authentication token can now be cached in the .twitter_oauth_token
file and
used for subsequent twitter API
requests without re-authentication. A new authentication
token can be cached by deleting this file and using the re-using the parameter
useCachedToken = TRUE
.