17.1 Data Collection
When it comes to sentiment analysis, the first and foremost step is collecting data. The quality and reliability of your data can make or break your analysis. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are excellent sources for gathering text data that we can analyze for sentiment.
To start off, let's focus on Twitter data collection. Twitter provides an API that allows users to access tweets programmatically. You can get tweets containing specific keywords, from specific users, and much more.
To use Twitter API, you'll first need to create a developer account and then create an app to get API credentials. You'll use these credentials to authenticate and access Twitter data.
Here's a simple example using Python's tweepy library to fetch tweets related to the keyword "Python":
# Install the tweepy library
!pip install tweepy
import tweepy
# Set up API credentials
consumer_key = "your_consumer_key_here...