vosonSML
Collecting Social Media Data and Generating Networks for Analysis
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.
Supported Social Media
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.
Installation
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")Getting started
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.
Usage
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.
Special thanks
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.
News
vosonSML 0.26.3
Bug Fixes
- Fixed bugs in
Create.actor.redditthat 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.
Minor Changes
- Improved output for
redditcollection. Removed the progress bar and added a table of results summarising the number of comments collected for each thread. - Added to
twittercollection output the userstwitter APIreset time.
vosonSML 0.26.2
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug in
Create.actor.twitterandCreate.bimodal.twitterin which the vertices dataframe provided to thegraph_from_data_framefunction as a contained duplicate names raising an error.
Major Changes
- Revised and updated
roxygendocumentation and examples for all package functions. - Updated all
Authenticate,CollectandCreateS3 methods to implement function routing based on object class names.
Minor Changes
- Created a
pkgdownweb site for github hosted package documentation. - Created a new hex sticker logo.
vosonSML 0.25.0
Major Changes
- Replaced the
twitteRtwitter collection implementation with thertweetpackage. - A users
twitterauthentication token can now be cached in the.twitter_oauth_tokenfile and used for subsequenttwitter APIrequests without re-authentication. A new authentication token can be cached by deleting this file and using the re-using the parameteruseCachedToken = TRUE.