The main goal of the app is to analyze textual and network data. Please feel free to upload and analyze your own data. Here are listed some additional data fetching functions.
The app can be used to fetch tweets through the Twitter API. This system works only with V2 ACCESS, not with previous versions of the Twitter API.
API Key
Please refer to the Twitter documentation to obtain the API Keys (necessary to use the Twitter fetcher). Please also be aware of the API limits, which might change depending on Twitter policy.
Search Query
- The search query can be specified by using Twitter standard operators, an example is
"happy hour" OR #freedrinks (happy OR moments). Please do not specify the language in this query. The corresponding search results can be visualized on search.twitter.com (this is a recommended step before starting the fetcher).- Language is used to specify the language of tweets.
- The maximum number of tweets has to be specified to avoid exceeding the API limits.
- Start and End Time fields can be used to limit the time interval for downloading tweets. Please be aware of the Twitter API limits.
- The premium checkbox can be selected to use premium Academic APIs for a full archive search - please refer to the Twitter documentation.
- The create networks and time interval fields can be used to create social networks from tweets, saved in the Pajek format. In particular, directed social networks can be created, with links obtained from retweets, replies, and mentions. No network will be created if the option no is selected. If the full dataset option is selected, one network will be generated from the full set of downloaded tweets. Alternatively, a time unit can be selected to specify a time interval. For example, choosing days and the value of 7 will produce weekly networks, beginning from the Start Time set in the search query. Networks do not contain isolates and loops. Accounts that tweet without mentioning any other account (or replying/retweeting) will not appear in the networks.
Output
A CSV file where the comma is used as the separator, with the following columns:
- “Text”: text of the tweet.
- “TweetCreatedAt”: date of the tweet.
- “RetweetCount”: number of times the original tweet has been retweeted.
- “LikeCount”: number of likes.
- “ReplyCount”: number of replies.
- “ScreenName”, “UserProfile” and “UserName” of the tweeting author.
- The number of accounts the user is “Following” and its number of “Followers”.
- “NumberTweets”: number of tweets posted by the users.
- “UserLocation”: location as specified by the user.
- “Kind”: is the type of tweet as classified by the Twitter API.
- “ReplyTo”: the account addressed by the reply tweet.
- “RetweetedAuthor”: the author of the tweet that has been retweeted.
- “Mentions”: this is the list of accounts mentioned in a tweet, including the original tweet’s author in case of replies or retweets. Names are separated by a vertical bar.
- Tweeting “AuthorID” and “TweetID”.