Abstract: Particularly when working with large social media datasets, quantitative and mixed- methods approaches that draw especially on visual representations of ‘big data’ are now an indispensable part of the scholarly research and publication process. This data analytics and visualisation tutorial will focus on a number of emerging standard tools and methods for large-scale data analytics, using Twitter data to illustrate these approaches. The tutorial will introduce participants to the open-source Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (TCAT) as a capable and reliable tool for data gathering from the Twitter API, and to the high-end data analytics software Tableau as a powerful means of processing and visualising large datasets. The skills gained in the tutorial are also transferrable to working with other large datasets from social media and other sources. The tutorial is led by Prof. Axel Bruns, who has led similar methods training activities at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, the CCI Digital Methods Summer School, and in invited workshops in Australia, Asia, and Europe.
Pre-Workshop Prep: Participants will be asked to bring their own laptops and to install a trial version of Tableau Desktop (www.tableau.com/products/trial) as well as download the sample datasets from Dropbox before the workshop: www.dropbox.com/s/o2afy089xbb2kpd/Paris%20Climate%20Change%20Conference%202015.twbx?dl=0
Workshop Contact
Axel Bruns – [email protected]
Presenter’s Bio:
Prof. Axel Bruns is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the Vice-President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and a co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), Twitter and Society (2014), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (2012) and Uses of Blogs (2006). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info. See http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ for more details on his research into social media.