Mining The Social Web

Mine the rich data tucked away in popular social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. With the third edition of this popular guide, data scientists, analysts, and programmers will learn how to glean insights from social media—including who’s connecting with whom, what they’re talking about, and where they’re located—using Python code examples, Jupyter notebooks, or Docker containers. In part one, each standalone chapter focuses on one aspect of the social landscape, including each of the major social sites, as well as web pages, blogs and feeds, mailboxes, GitHub, and a newly added chapter covering Instagram. Part two provides a cookbook with two dozen bite-size recipes for solving particular issues with Twitter. Get a straightforward synopsis of the social web landscape Use Docker to easily run each chapter’s example code, packaged as a Jupyter notebook Adapt and contribute to the code’s open source GitHub repository Learn how to employ best-in-class Python 3 tools to slice and dice the data you collect Apply advanced mining techniques such as TFIDF, cosine similarity, collocation analysis, clique detection, and image recognition Build beautiful data visualizations with Python and JavaScript toolkits

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn generate a tremendous amount of valuable social data, but how can you find out who's making connections with social media, what they’re talking about, or where they’re located? This concise and practical book shows you how to answer these questions and more. You'll learn how to combine social web data, analysis techniques, and visualization to help you find what you've been looking for in the social haystack, as well as useful information you didn't know existed. Each standalone chapter introduces techniques for mining data in different areas of the social Web, including blogs and email. All you need to get started is a programming background and a willingness to learn basic Python tools. Get a straightforward synopsis of the social web landscape Use adaptable scripts on GitHub to harvest data from social network APIs such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn Learn how to employ easy-to-use Python tools to slice and dice the data you collect Explore social connections in microformats with the XHTML Friends Network Apply advanced mining techniques such as TF-IDF, cosine similarity, collocation analysis, document summarization, and clique detection Build interactive visualizations with web technologies based upon HTML5 and JavaScript toolkits "Let Matthew Russell serve as your guide to working with social data sets old (email, blogs) and new (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook). Mining the Social Web is a natural successor to Programming Collective Intelligence: a practical, hands-on approach to hacking on data from the social Web with Python." --Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist, Cloudera "A rich, compact, useful, practical introduction to a galaxy of tools, techniques, and theories for exploring structured and unstructured data." --Alex Martelli, Senior Staff Engineer, Google

BuzzFeed News Senior Reporter Lam Thuy Vo explains how to mine, process, and analyze data from the social web in meaningful ways with the Python programming language. Did fake Twitter accounts help sway a presidential election? What can Facebook and Reddit archives tell us about human behavior? In Mining Social Media, senior BuzzFeed reporter Lam Thuy Vo shows you how to use Python and key data analysis tools to find the stories buried in social media. Whether you're a professional journalist, an academic researcher, or a citizen investigator, you'll learn how to use technical tools to collect and analyze data from social media sources to build compelling, data-driven stories. Learn how to: Write Python scripts and use APIs to gather data from the social web Download data archives and dig through them for insights Inspect HTML downloaded from websites for useful content Format, aggregate, sort, and filter your collected data using Google Sheets Create data visualizations to illustrate your discoveries Perform advanced data analysis using Python, Jupyter Notebooks, and the pandas library Apply what you've learned to research topics on your own Social media is filled with thousands of hidden stories just waiting to be told. Learn to use the data-sleuthing tools that professionals use to write your own data-driven stories.

Acquire and analyze data from all corners of the social web with Python About This Book Make sense of highly unstructured social media data with the help of the insightful use cases provided in this guide Use this easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to apply analytics to complicated and messy social data This is your one-stop solution to fetching, storing, analyzing, and visualizing social media data Who This Book Is For This book is for intermediate Python developers who want to engage with the use of public APIs to collect data from social media platforms and perform statistical analysis in order to produce useful insights from data. The book assumes a basic understanding of the Python Standard Library and provides practical examples to guide you toward the creation of your data analysis project based on social data. What You Will Learn Interact with a social media platform via their public API with Python Store social data in a convenient format for data analysis Slice and dice social data using Python tools for data science Apply text analytics techniques to understand what people are talking about on social media Apply advanced statistical and analytical techniques to produce useful insights from data Build beautiful visualizations with web technologies to explore data and present data products In Detail Your social media is filled with a wealth of hidden data – unlock it with the power of Python. Transform your understanding of your clients and customers when you use Python to solve the problems of understanding consumer behavior and turning raw data into actionable customer insights. This book will help you acquire and analyze data from leading social media sites. It will show you how to employ scientific Python tools to mine popular social websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and more. Explore the Python libraries used for social media mining, and get the tips, tricks, and insider insight you need to make the most of them. Discover how to develop data mining tools that use a social media API, and how to create your own data analysis projects using Python for clear insight from your social data. Style and approach This practical, hands-on guide will help you learn everything you need to perform data mining for social media. Throughout the book, we take an example-oriented approach to use Python for data analysis and provide useful tips and tricks that you can use in day-to-day tasks.

The definitive book on mining the Web from the preeminent authority.

Now in its second edition, this book focuses on practical algorithms for mining data from even the largest datasets.

Analyzing the Social Web provides a framework for the analysis of public data currently available and being generated by social networks and social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Access and analysis of this public data about people and their connections to one another allows for new applications of traditional social network analysis techniques that let us identify things like who are the most important or influential people in a network, how things will spread through the network, and the nature of peoples' relationships. Analyzing the Social Web introduces you to these techniques, shows you their application to many different types of social media, and discusses how social media can be used as a tool for interacting with the online public. Presents interactive social applications on the web, and the types of analysis that are currently conducted in the study of social media Covers the basics of network structures for beginners, including measuring methods for describing nodes, edges, and parts of the network Discusses the major categories of social media applications or phenomena and shows how the techniques presented can be applied to analyze and understand the underlying data Provides an introduction to information visualization, particularly network visualization techniques, and methods for using them to identify interesting features in a network, generate hypotheses for analysis, and recognize patterns of behavior Includes a supporting website with lecture slides, exercises, and downloadable social network data sets that can be used can be used to apply the techniques presented in the book

Liu has written a comprehensive text on Web mining, which consists of two parts. The first part covers the data mining and machine learning foundations, where all the essential concepts and algorithms of data mining and machine learning are presented. The second part covers the key topics of Web mining, where Web crawling, search, social network analysis, structured data extraction, information integration, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, Web usage mining, query log mining, computational advertising, and recommender systems are all treated both in breadth and in depth. His book thus brings all the related concepts and algorithms together to form an authoritative and coherent text. The book offers a rich blend of theory and practice. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners interested in Web mining and data mining both as a learning text and as a reference book. Professors can readily use it for classes on data mining, Web mining, and text mining. Additional teaching materials such as lecture slides, datasets, and implemented algorithms are available online.