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

Accessing Flickr's data


Now that we have a brief overview of Flickr, let's get started with our ritual of getting access to a platform's data. Pretty much as we have already seen across different social networks, Flickr exposes its data through a set of APIs for which we would need to create an app. For the use cases to be discussed further in this chapter, we will be relying on the latest API endpoints exposed by Flickr through direct calls, instead of R packages to do so. Flickr datasets, similar to StackExchange data dumps, though not official in certain cases, are also available on the Internet but are beyond the scope of this chapter.

Flickr exposes its data through APIs which accept and respond in formats such as JSON, XML, SOAP, and so on. It also supports developer API kits in various programming languages such as C, Java, Python, and so on, but unfortunately not in R. Though R has certain packages to connect and work with Flickr APIs, most of them are not updated with the latest...