Hi everyone,

Happy New Year and welcome back! Our first meeting in 2019 will take place on the 16th of January, from 5.30pm, in David Hume Tower, room LG.09 (see the map below for further details). The meeting will focus on tackling Twitter data. As usual, the meeting will be open for all to attend, and newcomers / beginners are very welcome!

Our first speaker is Dr Elliot Meador, researcher of rural economy and society, at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC). He will be sharing details on:

Visualising Twitter data using igraph, ggraph and tidytext (presentation here)

This talk looks at different approaches to visualising social networks using R. Using data pulled from Twitter, we will explore methods of visualising key trends in the data using a network approach. Specifically, this talk will cover: 1) pulling Twitter data from the API using iterative programing; 2) tidying the data using dplyr and tidytext; 3) creating network graphs in igraph; 4) visualising the graphs using ggraph; and 5) doing sentiment analysis on interesting network parameters (i.e., community detection, etc).

Our second speaker is Alasdair Sykes, agricultural modeller at SRUC. Alasdair has developed a web app for scraping tweets about the Fringe festival. The display uses Tableau, but the backend is R. Please see below for details:

Tracking the Edinburgh Fringe Festival using Twitter, R, & Tableau (slides here)

This talk focuses on a novel use of Twitter data to analyse social media trends during the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Edfringe is the single largest arts festival in the world, and the project integrated with an existing Fringe review site to track the popularity of individual shows and performers throughout the month-long festival. The talk will cover data collection using the rtweet and rvest packages, data cleaning and processing using stringr and dplyr, and real-time online presentation of the results using Tableau and Tableau Public.

Here is a map of where we’ll be for the meeting, followed by a trip to the nearby St. Andrews Brewing Co. pub:

See you there!

Caterina Constantinescu