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Access to Social Feed Manager is controlled. To get started with Social Feed Manager, you will need to contact us at datahelp@gmu.edu and tell us about your project. We will set up a consultation with you and then will create a Social Feed Manager account for you.
Social Feed Manager is open source software created by a team out of George Washington University that harvests social media data from platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo. Created for researchers, students, librarians, and archivists, you can use Social Feed Manager to gather datasets created with specific research questions and/or build collections for future research. Social Feed Manager uses each platform's public APIs to harvest data.
Alternatively, or in addition to Social Feed Manager, you can check out Documenting the Now, which has a Tweet catalog; the Internet Archive; and Tweepy, a Python library for accessing the Twitter API.
Social Feed Manager Resources:
Tutorial: Brad Rittenhouse, Ximin Mi, and Courtney Allen, "Beginners Guide to Twitter Data" (2019)
Scholarly article using Social Feed Manager: Tawnya Azar, "Inside and Outside the Literary Marketplace: The Digital Products of Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie," South Asian Review 3 (2019): 190-205.
1. At George Mason, most students and faculty use Social Feed Manager to mine Twitter data. Prior to starting with Social Feed Manager you have to apply for a Twitter developer account, and note that any limits Twitter puts on its public API affects the data you will get from the Social Feed Manager.
2. Once you're logged in to Social Feed Manager, you will be asked to add your Twitter credentials, including the name, API key, API secret key, access token, and the access secret token.
3. Create a collection set. A collection set can contain multiple collections, so think of a collection set as a folder that contains all of your collections. You have to create a collection set name, and use the description field to describe the collection set and your rationale for what you're choosing to put in that collection set.
4. Add a collection to your collection set. If you're wanting to analyze Twitter data, you can add a user timeline, search, filter, or sample.
5. Add seeds to your collection. Seeds are the criteria you set that Social Feed Manager uses to collect social media posts. To add a seed, make sure the collection is turned off. Click add seed, or add bulk seeds. Enter either the user IDs or search criteria. Then turn the collection back on.
6. To export your data, go to your collection set, and navigate to the collection whose data you want to export. In the upper right hand corner, click export. You are able to export in multiple formats: Excel, CSV, TSV, JSON, and more. You can also limit by item date range or harvest date range.
