Book Image

Python Social Media Analytics

By : Baihaqi Siregar, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Michal Krystyanczuk
Book Image

Python Social Media Analytics

By: Baihaqi Siregar, Siddhartha Chatterjee, Michal Krystyanczuk

Overview of this book

Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Pinterest, and YouTube have become part of everyday life in a big way. However, these complex and noisy data streams pose a potent challenge to everyone when it comes to harnessing them properly and benefiting from them. This book will introduce you to the concept of social media analytics, and how you can leverage its capabilities to empower your business. Right from acquiring data from various social networking sources such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and social forums, you will see how to clean data and make it ready for analytical operations using various Python APIs. This book explains how to structure the clean data obtained and store in MongoDB using PyMongo. You will also perform web scraping and visualize data using Scrappy and Beautifulsoup. Finally, you will be introduced to different techniques to perform analytics at scale for your social data on the cloud, using Python and Spark. By the end of this book, you will be able to utilize the power of Python to gain valuable insights from social media data and use them to enhance your business processes.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

MongoDB to store and access social data


According to Wikipedia:

MongoDB (from humongous) is a cross-platform document-oriented database. Classified as a NoSQL database, MongoDB eschews the traditional table-based relational database structure in favor of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), making the integration of data in certain types of applications easier and faster. Released under a combination of the GNU Affero General Public License and the Apache License, MongoDB is free and open-source software.

Even though the objective of the chapter is not to explore the architecture of MongoDB in depth we are however going to explain the points that justify the use of MongoDB.

Along with ease of use, MongoDB is recognized for the following advantages:

  • Schema-less design: Unlike traditional relational databases, which require the data to fit its schema, MongoDB provides a flexible schema-less data model. The data model is based on documents and collections. A...