Big data analysis for social scientists

Rob Ackland and Timothy Graham (University of Queensland) ran a five-day course on Social Media Analysis at the ACSPRI Winter Program, University of Queensland.

The course is an introduction to collection and analysis of socially-generated 'big data' in the context of social research, using the R statistical software and Gephi network visualization software. It covers methods of accessing, constructing, analyzing and visualizing social (people and organizations) and semantic (terms) networks, using data from websites, blogsites, Twitter and Facebook.

The course also covered text analysis, temporal analysis, and techniques to work with large datasets (e.g. sampling and filtering).

The session was held between July 4 to 8, 2016.