Practical ways to analyse Twitter data (quantitative and qualitative)

This session will discuss different perspectives on how Twitter data can be analysed and used in teaching or research which will be split into two parts.

The first will focus on a more quantitative approach starting with a brief explanation of the various tools available for Twitter data collection and analysis. This will be followed by a demo of two social media analysis platforms: Socioviz and NodeXL using pre-prepared data to give an overview of how these platforms can be used and the results they show. Additionally for NodeXL, highlight some parts of results that people don’t necessarily look at. This part will finish with a discussion of examples from the author’s teaching using these platforms.

The second part of the session will look at a more qualitative approach with content analysis of collected tweets. This will outline the practical aspects of collecting tweets particularly long-term collection and outline the various platforms, including Excel, Word and NVivo, that can be used for content analysis, their affordances and a brief discussion of the pros and cons of each. Coding methods including automatic inductive coding or deductive coding will be outlined and how the platforms can facilitate that. This session will finish with a brief discussion of some examples of content analysis of tweets using the #SocMedHE Twitter hashtag as well as results from Olivia Kelly’s doctoral research.