Tools: 

Social Media Tools / Sources for Direct Harvesting of Data

1. Discover Text (not free) eg text mining tool – ‘build a social media sifter’,  one platform to  capture, filter, de-duplicate, cluster, search, human code, and machine-classify large numbers of small, unstructured units of text

2. SentiStrength - estimates the strength of positive and negative sentiment in short texts

3. ThreadMill  -  enables users to analyze, graph, and download data from and about online conversations. (Social Media Research Foundation)

4. Hootsuite – social network tracking and analysis tool, tweet archive (not free)

Managing and Using Data from Social Media  

5. Node XL – working with Social media data within Excel (Social Media Research Foundation)

6. Webometric Analyst (University of Wolverhampton) – website has downloads, tools and latest draft of manuals on social media research

7. Gephi – a tool to explore and understand graphical representations of data where the user interacts with the representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colours to reveal hidden properties

8. Many Eyes – explore existing visualisation tools and create new ones

9. Visual.ly - a showcase for infographics as well as a marketplace and community for publishers, designers, and researchers. First success was the widely used Twitter Visualizer tool

10. Snap Bird - a Tweet search application that helps you find older Tweets (not always loading)

11. The Archivist - tool to track a term or hashtag on Twitter. Gives you beautiful graphics and can create an archive, analyze, export and share the tweets

12. Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheets (TAGS): you can copy their spreadsheet and then redefine your own terms

13. Data Sift: paid for social media data platform, includes data from Twitter Facebook – expensive but also has free access blogs and community pages

14. Data Wrangler: used by Guardian. Very simple visualisation tool with video tutorials

15. Timeline: Open Source visualisation tool. Creates timeline of occurrences

Archives of - or - About Social Media

16. WayBackMachine – archive of Internet sites as far back as 1996

17. Oxford Internet Survey - an authoritative source of information about Internet access, use and attitudes

18. Socdir.com - a social tool directory of social media tools, expert driven toolkits, recipes, and an online community for social networking researchers, developers etc plus reviews

19. Digital Methods Initiative: for media analysis, data treatment, device centric, spherical

20. Pew Internet & American Life Project – includes reports on social media, data and data tools

Case study journal articles: 

1.  http://hij.sagepub.com/content/16/4/440.short Anstead and O’Loughlin, ‘The emerging viewertariat and BBC Question Time: Television debate and real-time commenting online’

2. http://1.usa.gov/12pe89o Schmidt (2012) Trending now - Using Social Media to Predict and Track Disease Outbreaks

3. http://bit.ly/1bz8zVs Wolfsfeld et al (2012) Social Media and the Arab Spring - Politics Comes First

4. http://bit.ly/15ZngQk Edwards and Matwyshyn (2011) Twitter (R)evolution: Privacy, Free Speech and Disclosure

5.  Janelle Ward (2011): REACHING CITIZENS ONLINE, Information, Communication & Society, 14:6, 917-936: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.572982