Author: James Ashford

Website: https://jrashford.com
About James Ashford: I’m an academic in the UK researching Network Science and Social Computing. I enjoy scraping, analysing and visualising data and social networks. In my free time, I like to explore the outdoors, mountain climbing, cycling, running and attending church. I think of myself as an all-round nerd.

Posts by James Ashford

Modelling Discussion Threads From Mastodon Timelines Using Python and Networkx

Posted on 16 February 2023 (28 February 2023)

On Mastodon, users have the ability to reply to another user’s post by leaving comments as a response. This feature is designed to encourage users to engage and build connections with others. With this function, users can initiate a conversation and participate with others which forms what is known as a discussion thread. From a […]

How I Learnt to Manage the Impostor Syndrome in Academia

Posted on 15 February 2023 (28 February 2023)

If there’s one thing I have experienced throughout my entire time as a PhD student and early career researcher, it is the impostor syndrome. It is the horrible feeling and I know for sure that I am not the only one who has experience this. It’s quite common for many people in my position to […]

Building User-Hashtag Co-occurrence Network from Timelines on Mastodon

Posted on 14 February 2023 (28 February 2023)

Hashtags are an incredibly useful feature for annotating posts and have an active role on microblogging platforms such as Twitter and Mastodon. They are particularly helpful for discovering new people to follow and finding interesting posts. In a separate post, I used Twitter to build hashtag co-occurrence networks based upon a specific hashtag. The general […]

How to Scrape Mastodon Timelines Using Python and Pandas

Posted on 13 February 2023 (28 February 2023)

Over the past few months, Mastodon, the Federated microblogging alternative to Twitter, has gained a lot of attraction in light of the events going on surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Upon further inspection, it turns out most instances have a public facing REST API for allowing users to interact with their services using third-party […]

Interacting With REST APIs in Python With 5 Lines of Code

Posted on 8 February 2023 (28 February 2023)

An essential skill for any web scraper or data scientist is to know how to collect information from a publicly available REST API. In short, a REST API is a very simple web service where simple HTTP requests (just like a web browser) are used to collect data usually in the form of a JSON […]

How I Use Mastodon: My Top 5 Favourite Mastodon Features

Posted on 3 February 2023 (28 February 2023)

Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) provide so many useful features which simply aren’t present on other microblogging sites like Twitter. I’ve come to realise how much I’ve missed all those years I spent trying to figure out how to use Twitter. All this time I’ve realised now that Mastodon provides everything I need. In […]

What Is the Fediverse, and Why Does It Matter?

Posted on 30 January 2023 (28 February 2023)

Users of the internet have witnessed many movements over the past few decades. We have seen the shift from Web 2.0 to 3.0 and social media’s rise and widespread use. There is, however, a new movement taking place on the internet which is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. What am I referring to exactly? I […]