Twitter API Access for Social Media Mining Module
Learn how to access the Twitter API, extract data, clean and preprocess it, perform data modeling, frequency analysis, clustering, segmentations, and visualize results using R programming.
Twitter API Access for Social Media Mining Module
E N D
Presentation Transcript
R Programming Social Media Mining Module: Accessing an API
Social Media Mining Module • Accessing an API • Extracting Data • Cleaning and PreProcessing • Data Modeling • Frequency analysis • Clustering • Segmentations • Result Visualizations
SMMM: Accessing an API API = Application Program(ming) Interface An application program interface (API) is code that allows two software programs to communicate with each other.
SMMM: Accessing the Twitter API STEP 1: Create a Twitter account STEP 2: Install a bunch of packages (see code). STEP 3: Go to: https://apps.twitter.com/app/new
SMMM: Accessing the Twitter API STEP 4: Obtain your keys and your tokens. You will need four pieces of information to connect to the Twitter API – • Customer API Key • Customer API Secret • Access Token • Token Secret Note that these are UNIQUE to you and TEMPORARY.
SMMM: Accessing the Twitter API STEP 5: Establish the connection and then create the “handshake”. reqURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token" accessURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/access_token" authURL <- "https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize" twitCred <- OAuthFactory$new (consumerKey=consumerKey, consumerSecret=consumerSecret, requestURL=reqURL, accessURL=accessURL,authURL=authURL) twitCred$handshake(cainfo = system.file("CurlSSL","cacert.pem", package = "RCurl")) STEP 6: The “handshake” will generate a unique PIN that you will have to paste into your console.
SMMM: Accessing an API Once you establish the handshake, you are ready to start scraping! You can scrape “real time” using FilterStream or you can scrape retroactively using SearchTwitter.
