Using social media to study social pheonomena: An example using Twitter data
Twitter is a social networking platform that offers a simple, yet powerful service. The majority of its functionality resides in 140-character-maximum statuses, or ‘tweets’. We are developing a Java application that utilizes the service's application programming interfaces (APIs). The purpose is to offer a level of integrated functionality not provided by their website, and to circumvent some of the time constraints of manual analysis. The application provides a convenient way to pull tweets for a particular user or a specified search query into a delimited text document, offering very simple integration with spreadsheet software for analysis. This would be an especially valuable tool for people researching social networking activity, but can also be utilized by anyone to analyze public response to current events or popular culture. An example based on current events is presented.
This is the second in a series of working ::: papers published by the Higher Education ::: Academy to disseminate information about ::: the project entitled 'What is learned at ::: university: the social and organisational ::: mediation of university learning' (SOMUL). ::: This second working paper focuses on the ::: organisational mediation of learning, i.e. how ::: institutional characteristics shape the ::: student experience and resultant learning ::: outcomes within an increasingly diverse ::: higher education system.