Quick Start Guide

This quick start guide describes how you can start using Social Feed Manager to select, harvest, explore, export, process and analyze social media data. This covers just the basics of using the software; technical information about installing and administering SFM can be found in the technical-documentation.

Prerequisites

SFM in operation

This quick start guide assumes SFM is already set up and running. For details about installing and administering SFM, see technical-documentation.

An SFM account

You can sign up for an account by clicking the Sign Up link from within SFM.

If you’d like to set up shared collecting at your institution, you’ll need to have your systems administrator set up groups in SFM.

API credentials

You will need API credentials for each of the social media platforms from which you want to collect. This is more than the Twitter/Flickr/Weibo account that you may already have. To get API credentials:

  • Request credentials from the social media platform and enter them into Credentials section. The API Credentials page provides instructions for each platform.
  • For some social media platforms, your administrator may have enabled an option that will allow you to connect your account without leaving SFM. With your permission, SFM will get credentials on your behalf. Click Credentials and then Connect [Twitter, Tumblr, or Weibo] Account.
  • If you are part of a group, you’ll be able to use the credentials already provided by another member of the group.

Setting up collections

Hopefully you’ve considered what you want to use SFM to collect: which social media accounts, which queries/hashtags/searches/etc., and on which platform(s). You may also have learned a bit about the social media platforms’ APIs and best practices for collecting from social media APIs. Now you’d like to set up your collections in SFM.

Create a collection set

At the top of the page, go to Collection Sets and click the Add Collection Set button. A collection set is just a group of collections around a particular topic or theme. For example, you might set up a “2016 U.S. Elections” collection set.

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Create a collection

On the collection set detail page, under Collections click the Add Collection button and select a type.

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Collection types differ based on the social media platform and the part of the API from which the social media is to be collected. For more information, see Collection types.

The collection types supported by SFM include:

SFM allows you to create multiple collections of each type within a collection set. For example, you might create a “Democratic candidate Twitter user timelines” collection and a “Republican candidate Twitter user timelines” collection. Collections are one way of organizing harvested content.

Each collection’s harvest type has specific options, which may include:

  • Schedule of how often to collect (e.g. daily, monthly). Streaming harvest types such as Twitter filter don’t have a schedule – they’re either on or off.
  • Whether to perform web harvests of images, videos, or web pages embedded or linked from the posts.
  • Whether to harvest incrementally. For example, each time a Twitter user timeline harvest runs, it can either collect only new items since the last harvest, or it can try to re-collect each entire timeline.
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Add seeds

Some harvest types require seeds, which are the specific targets for collection.

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As shown in the chart below, what a seed is and the number of seeds varies by harvest type. Note that some harvest types don’t have any seeds.

Harvest type Seed How many?
Twitter search Search query 1 or more
Twitter filter Track/Follow/Locations 1 or more
Twitter user timeline Twitter Account Name or ID 1 or more
Twitter sample None None
Flickr user Flickr Account Name or ID 1 or more
Weibo timeline None None

Start harvesting

Each collection’s detail page has a Turn On button.

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Once you turn on the collection, harvesting will proceed in the background according to the collection’s schedule. It will stop when it hits the end date or you turn it off.

The collection’s detail page will also show a message noting when the next harvest is scheduled for.

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As harvesting progresses, SFM will list the results of harvests on the collection’s detail page.

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During harvesting

Within SFM, harvesting is performed by (you guessed it) harvesters. Harvesters make calls to the social media platforms’ APIs and records the social media data in WARC files. (WARC is a standard file format used for web archiving.)

Depending on the collection options you selected, SFM may also extract URLs from the posts; these URLs link to web resources such as images, web pages, etc. SFM passes the URLs to the web harvester, which will collect these web resources (similar to more traditional web archiving).

To monitor harvesting:

  • View details on each harvest in the Harvests section of the collection detail page.
  • Check the visualizations of the number of items harvested for each collection on the home page. (Click Social Feed Manager in the top left of the page).
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If you want to make changes to the collection’s options and/or its seeds after harvesting is started, turn off the collection and then click the Edit button.

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You’ll be able to turn it back on and resume collecting afterwards.

Exploring, exporting, processing and analyzing your social media data

SFM provides several mechanisms for exporting collected social media data or feeding the social media data into your own processing pipelines. It also provides some basic tools for exploring and analyzing the collected content within the SFM environment.

Exports

To export collected social media data, click the Export button on the collection detail page. Exports are available in a number of formats, including Excel, CSV, and JSON.

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The “Full JSON” format provides the posts (e.g. tweets) in their original form, whereas the other export formats provide a subset of the metadata for each social media item. For example, for a tweet, the CSV export includes the tweet’s “coordinates” value but not the “geo” value.

Dehydration (exporting a list of just the IDs of social media items) is supported for certain data-sharing purposes.

Exports are run in the background, and larger exports may take a significant amount of time. You will receive an email when it is completed or you can monitor the status on the Exports page, where you can vew details about the export. This is also where you will find a link to download the export file once it becomes available.

_images/export_page.png _images/excel.png

Processing

If you’ve set up a processing container, or if you’ve installed SFM tools locally, then you have access to the collected social media data from the command line. You can then feed the data into your own processing pipeline and use your own tools.

More on this topic can be found in the Processing section.

Exploration and analysis

While SFM does not provide a comprehensive toolset for exploring and analyzing the collected social media data, it provides some basic exploration and analysis tools and allows you to export social media data for use with your own tools.

Tools provided by SFM are:

  • ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)

The ELK stack is a general-purpose framework for exploring data. It provides support for loading, querying, analysis, and visualization. SFM provides an instance of ELK that has been customized for exploring social media data, in particular, Twitter and Weibo data.

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ELK may be particularly useful for monitoring and adjusting the targets of ongoing social media collections. For example, it can be used to discover additional relevant Twitter hashtags or user accounts to collect, based on what has been collected so far.

ELK requires some additional setup. More on this topic can be found in the Exploring social media data with ELK section.

  • Processing container

A processing container allows you to have access to the collected social media content from the command line. The processing container has been provisioned with a handful of analysis tools such as Twarc utils.

The following shows piping some tweets into a wordcloud generator from within a processing container:

# find_warcs.py 4f4d1 | xargs twitter_rest_warc_iter.py | python /opt/twarc/utils/wordcloud.py

More on this topic can be found in the Processing section.

Access and display

SFM does not currently provide a web interface to the collected social media content. However, this should be possible, and we welcome your ideas and contributions.