Twitter data in R

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Update (November 2024): Since the publication of this blogpost, Twitter has revised its API access policies, and it is no longer freely accessible in the same way it once was. As a result, some of the workshop slides are now out of date.

Slides | All course materials

Earlier this month, I taught my two-day course on working with Twitter data in R, at the University of Lucerne. This was part of a Master’s Programme in Computational Social Science, LUMACSS.

This course is designed as an introduction to collecting, cleaning, and analysing Twitter data — without having to apply for a developer account. You can find the course material at GitHub. The slides are better viewed here on my website.*

Once the teaching sessions are over, I guide those interested in using Twitter data for academic research to write a strong application for Academic Research access, which removes many of Twitter’s strict restrictions on how much data is otherwise available to download, how quickly, how frequently, and how far dating back.

I would be happy to organise this course again. Let me know if this might be possible at your institution.

And if you like the sound of this course, you might also be interested in the other digital-skills courses that I teach. Have a look at the teaching section of my website.


* These HTML slides crash for some Safari users. If using a different browser application, such as Chrome or Firefox, is not an option for you, I recommend viewing the PDF version of the slides on GitHub.