Mining Social Media: Finding Stories in Internet Data

by Lam Thuy Vo

BuzzFeed News Senior Reporter Lam Thuy Vo explains how to mine, process, and analyze data from the social web in meaningful ways with the Python programming language.

Did fake Twitter accounts help sway a presidential election? What can Facebook and Reddit archives tell us about human behavior? In Mining Social Media , senior BuzzFeed reporter Lam Thuy Vo shows you how to use Python and key data analysis tools to find the stories buried in social media.

Whether you're a professional journalist, an academic researcher, or a citizen investigator, you'll learn how to use technical tools to collect and analyze data from social media sources to build compelling, data-driven stories.

Learn how

Social media is filled with thousands of hidden stories just waiting to be told. Learn to use the data-sleuthing tools that professionals use to write your own data-driven stories.

Genres: Programming, Nonfiction, Computers, Reference, Coding, Computer Science, Technology

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 25, 2019

Reviews

[Mik Vargas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book for people with no prior programming experience. The author is really good explaining basic programming concepts, and he also makes a decent introduction to data analysis. He covers crucial libraries for data analysis and web scraping such as pandas, matplotlib and beautifulsoup4. I expected a further explanation of some data analysis concepts from a mathematical perspective, but probably the audience he is targeting is people that are curious about data science.

[Sammi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good intro to Python and Pandas. You use it to scrape stuff, so there are actual uses and it's not just theoretical. I'm keeping this around as a reference book. Also good for finally understanding random stuff like APIs and UTF-8 encoding.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fairly fun read.

I got a lot of cool experiments and code examples to try out.

I have been playing around with some of the scripts and testing out some of the APIs.

Would recommend for those coders who also dabble in social media or social media mining.

3.9/5

[James Breger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good short book on analyzing social media

This is a good introduction to getting
information from social media. It's for people with little programing experience. Great introduction

[paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introduction to using social media API's, data analysis tools and web scripting.

[Jeremy Kolassa]

Turns out this wasn't what I thought it was. Too basic for my needs.