Twitter Scraping with TAGS
TAGS is an easy, free and open source tool to scrape Twitter data.
Twitter is a social media platform boasting over 310 million active users and offering researchers a treasure trove of data. There several advantages of using Twitter data:
- Twitter is international. It supports 40+ languages and 79% of it's users live outside of America
- The majority of it's users are on mobiles, allowing Twitter to provide up-to-date information
- All posts are 140 characters or less, making sentiment analysis easier
- Twitter hashtags allow you collect information on a specific area of interest
- And of course, you can collect information from a huge number of users!
Researchers are already using this data to track outbreaks of disease (Sickweather), pinpoint sources of food poisoning, predict the stock market, measure happiness and predict elections!
The good news is that there is an easy way to access this data with TAGS! By the end of this chapter you will learn:
- What types data you can get from Twitter
- What is Twitter scraping
- How to use TAGS to perform Twitter scraping
- How to make sense of the summary statistics that TAGS provides for your scraped data
- What other tools are out there