Book Image

Learning Social Media Analytics with R

By : Dipanjan Sarkar, Karthik Ganapathy, Raghav Bali, Tushar Sharma
Book Image

Learning Social Media Analytics with R

By: Dipanjan Sarkar, Karthik Ganapathy, Raghav Bali, Tushar Sharma

Overview of this book

The Internet has truly become humongous, especially with the rise of various forms of social media in the last decade, which give users a platform to express themselves and also communicate and collaborate with each other. This book will help the reader to understand the current social media landscape and to learn how analytics can be leveraged to derive insights from it. This data can be analyzed to gain valuable insights into the behavior and engagement of users, organizations, businesses, and brands. It will help readers frame business problems and solve them using social data. The book will also cover several practical real-world use cases on social media using R and its advanced packages to utilize data science methodologies such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, text summarization, recommendation systems, social network analysis, classification, and clustering. This will enable readers to learn different hands-on approaches to obtain data from diverse social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook. It will also show readers how to establish detailed workflows to process, visualize, and analyze data to transform social data into actionable insights.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Social Media Analytics with R
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Foursquare – the app and data


Foursquare was founded in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. It was a reimagined version of a similar service, Dodgeball, founded by Crowley in his graduate studies days. Dodgeball was an attempt to help the user interact with his neighborhood using his phone and primarily using SMS messages:

Foursquare main page. Image source: By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43651932

Foursquare continued that paradigm and tried to use the new features of smartphones for achieving the same interaction, the most important of these features being the GPS.

Tip

The initial rise to fame of Foursquare was related to its innovative check-in feature, which allowed a user to share his/her location at any venue. This feature was quite similar to Facebook's own check-in feature. Although with the launch of Foursquare 8.0, the check-in feature has been removed from the Foursquare application.

A unique feature of Foursquare data is the tips...