Event Phone: 1-610-715-0115

Cancellation Policy: If you cancel your registration at least two weeks before the course is scheduled to begin, you are entitled to a full refund (minus a processing fee of $50).

In the unlikely event that Statistical Horizons LLC must cancel a seminar, we will do our best to inform you as soon as possible of the cancellation. You would then have the option of receiving a full refund of the seminar fee or a credit towards another seminar. In no event shall Statistical Horizons LLC be liable for any incidental or consequential damages that you may incur because of the cancellation.

An 8-Hour Livestream Seminar Taught by Resul Umit, Ph.D.

The emergence of new social media platforms presents fresh opportunities for researchers. Bluesky, in particular, is rapidly gaining a large and active user base while offering free access to its data — making it an invaluable resource for academics and professionals alike.

Yet, leveraging social media data demands specialized skills that are often absent from traditional academic and professional training. This short course bridges that gap by providing you with the essential knowledge and practical tools to effectively work with social media data from Bluesky.

Bluesky’s rich data offers immense potential to inspire innovative research or enhance existing projects. This two-day course provides a thorough, hands-on introduction to collecting, preparing, and analyzing data from Bluesky using the R programming language. Through a carefully structured series of demonstrations and exercises that progressively build skills, you will gain practical expertise in social media data analysis, opening new doors to impactful research, actionable insights, and professional growth.

By the end of this course, you will be able to effectively use R to access and collect data from the Bluesky API, clean and prepare the resulting datasets for analysis, and apply core methods for analyzing social media data.

On the first day of the seminar, you will learn about APIs and how they facilitate data retrieval, focusing on setting up and authenticating access to the Bluesky API. The session will cover techniques for collecting various types of data from profiles and their posts. Demonstrations and hands-on exercises will involve writing R scripts to retrieve data from Bluesky, ensuring that you gain practical experience from the outset.

The next part of the workshop will focus on cleaning and preparing data for analysis, with an emphasis on the unique characteristics of social media content. The session will introduce key challenges, such as managing hashtags, mentions, emojis, and links, and will cover tidy data principles for efficient data manipulation. Demonstrations will showcase R packages designed for processing textual data, illustrating how to clean and structure Bluesky data in preparation for analysis.

On the second day, the workshop will focus on analyzing Bluesky data, drawing on core methods in social media analysis, such as network analysis, textual analysis, and counting based analysis. Demonstrations and exercises will provide insights into different analytical strategies and their applications to real-world data.