Research Associate, Network Analysis, Social Media and Programming
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more