Book Image

Mastering Social Media Mining with R

Book Image

Mastering Social Media Mining with R

Overview of this book

With an increase in the number of users on the web, the content generated has increased substantially, bringing in the need to gain insights into the untapped gold mine that is social media data. For computational statistics, R has an advantage over other languages in providing readily-available data extraction and transformation packages, making it easier to carry out your ETL tasks. Along with this, its data visualization packages help users get a better understanding of the underlying data distributions while its range of "standard" statistical packages simplify analysis of the data. This book will teach you how powerful business cases are solved by applying machine learning techniques on social media data. You will learn about important and recent developments in the field of social media, along with a few advanced topics such as Open Authorization (OAuth). Through practical examples, you will access data from R using APIs of various social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, GitHub, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Blogger, and other networks. We will provide you with detailed explanations on the implementation of various use cases using R programming. With this handy guide, you will be ready to embark on your journey as an independent social media analyst.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Mastering Social Media Mining with R
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Mapping solutions using Google Maps


Google Maps provides mapping solutions. By using the R package RgoogleMaps, we can get the static images from Google Maps using the name of the place or using the latitude and longitude of that place. We can also use the map as the background and plot location-specific charts.

In this section, we will see how to access the Google Maps API from R. We need to first install the package RgoogleMaps:

install.packages("RgoogleMaps")
library(RgoogleMaps)

We can use the function getGeoCode to get the exact latitude and longitude of a specific place. We will get the latitude and the longitude of some of the most famous places. The code is as follows:

getGeoCode("Big Ben")
getGeoCode("10 Downing Street")
getGeoCode("London Eye")

We get the following output:

We can get the static maps for the preceding places using the function GetMap. Let's look at London's iconic timepiece on a map:

BigBenMap<- GetMap(center="Big Ben", zoom=13)
PlotOnStaticMap(BigBenMap)

We get the...