Introduction to Collecting Social Media and Web Data for Humanities and Social Sciences Researchers

This workshop introduces you to the basic techniques for collecting information from social media sites and the web in general. We cover Twitter, Facebook, and general web pages. We spend most of our time looking at Twitter, but the basics of collecting information from Facebook is also introduced, and we talk generally about a few methods for collecting from web pages. Working examples are shared throughout that you can take and use (almost) immediately. Prior programming experience is neither needed nor expected. The final 30 minutes is used for open consultation about any scraping projects you are currently engaged in, planning, or just starting to think about.