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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.

A 3-Day Livestream Seminar Taught by Monica Alexander, Ph.D

The growth of social media websites like Facebook and Twitter present an opportunity for researchers to explore new data sources. Social media data show potential particularly for studying online communities and networks, temporary and permanent geographic mobility, and the sharing and spread of information (and misinformation).

Most social media websites permit the extraction of certain types of data through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs make it possible to extract large amounts of information about website activity, essentially in real time. These data can then be processed, cleaned, and manipulated in a range of statistical analyses.

In this seminar, you will learn to collect and process data from Spotify, Genius Lyrics, and Facebook’s Advertising Platform. In addition to these data sources, you will also learn how to analyze Twitter data and text data from scientific journal articles. We will cover how to extract data from APIs, geocoding, static and interactive mapping, and an introduction to text analysis methods, including sentiment analysis and topic models. We will do all of our coding in the R using the tidyverse style.

This course focuses on how to extract and use common sources of social media data. Participants will learn to use APIs to extract information, format that information into datasets that can be used in various analyses, and analyze the available data using a range of different methods. We will be working with data from Spotify, Genius lyrics, Twitter, Facebook’s Advertising Platform, and text data from scientific journal articles.

The course will focus on the whole workflow, from extracting data, data cleaning and preparation, geocoding and mapping, plotting and visualization, and text analysis. Participants will learn practical skills to take with them in future analyses and projects.