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

Accessing data from Quora


Quora is a popular question and answer website where questions are asked, answered, and managed by the community members and the entire operations is gamified. The interesting answers can get some points and the users could also shell out some points to get some of their questions answered by certain people.

There are ways to get the data from Quora, but there is an unofficial API which returns the data in the JSON format. It is actually a set of URLs that will provide us with the required information. These URLs will also work in browsers. Once we get the data in the JSON format, we can convert it into the data frame format later.

Let's see some of the URLs and ways to use it in R. The API's base URL is http://quora.christopher.su. To the base URL, we need to add the following to get the relevant data:

  • /users/<user>/activity/answers

  • /users/<user>/activity/user_follows

  • /users/<user>/activity/want_answers

  • /users/<user>/activity/upvotes

  • ...