Tutorials - James Ashford

James Ashford

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Tutorials

A collection of 13 posts

How to Stream from the Mastodon API via HTTP in Python

How to Stream from the Mastodon API via HTTP in Python

As I’ve mentioned in many of my blog posts before this one, Mastodon has a publicly available API which can be used to scrape statuses, collect hashtags and much more. One feature that I have yet to mention in this blog is the ability to stream statuses as Mastodon

How to Build a Self-Organising Map (SOM) in Python Step-by-Step

How to Build a Self-Organising Map (SOM) in Python Step-by-Step

In a separate blog post, I covered the basis for understanding how self-organising maps (SOM) work. This included what a SOM is, why SOM’s are useful and how they work – including the training algorithm. In this blog post, we’ll go through how we can build a simple SOM

How Self-Organising Maps Work: Explained with Graphics

Artificial Neural Networks (simply known as neural networks) come in all different shapes and sizes and can be designed to solve different types of problems. Classification, regression, supervised and unsupervised. Neural networks are incredibly versatile. It’s fair to say that neural networks are the go-to solution for any predictive

How to Build Tag Clouds From Mastodon Hashtags

How to Build Tag Clouds From Mastodon Hashtags

Hashtags are an important part of microblogging and are used to reach a wider audience of interested people. Much like Twitter, hashtags are also widely used on Mastodon and it’s common for users to include as many hashtags as possible in their posts to maximum the audience reach. Also,

How to Import a Network From a Spreadsheet Using Gephi

Gephi, is an amazing piece of software for building and visualising different types of network. It is considered the go-to software for network analytics and visualisation and is widely used by those who study social networks, such as myself. I use Gephi almost on a daily basis. As well as

How to Scrape Mastodon Timelines Using Python and Pandas

How to Scrape Mastodon Timelines Using Python and Pandas

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

How to Scrape a Twitter Timeline

How to Scrape a Twitter Timeline

EDIT (Feb 2023): As of 09/02/2023, Twitter is closing down public access to the API and replacing it with a paid service. In a separate blog post, we covered the basics for learning how to stream tweets from Twitter using Python. This is ideal if you are interested

How to Stream Tweets using the Twitter API

EDIT (Feb 2023): As of 09/02/2023, Twitter is closing down public access to the API and replacing it with a paid service. Collecting tweets from Twitter can be done in a number of different ways. In a previous blog post, we showed how to extract social network interactions

How to Hydrate Tweets using Twython

EDIT (Feb 2023): As of 09/02/2023, Twitter is closing down public access to the API and replacing it with a paid service.

How to Hydrate Tweets using Hydrator

EDIT (Feb 2023): As of 09/02/2023, Twitter is closing down public access to the API and replacing it with a paid service. In this two-part series post, we cover two ways to hydrate tweets for data analysis. I thought it was best to split this into two parts

Self-Hosting with Cloudflare Tunnels (feat Raspberry Pi)

Self-Hosting with Cloudflare Tunnels (feat Raspberry Pi)

EDIT FEB 2024: All of this can now be managed through the Cloudflare dashboard. If you’ve ever self-hosted services on your local network and wanted to expose them to the world, you would know that this is not a straightforward matter. This involves opening up your firewall by forwarding

How to Collect Data From Reddit - Introducing PRAW

If you’re a nerd like me, you’ll probably be very familiar with Reddit . Reddit describes itself as “the front page of the internet” which is certainly true for me and many others. I use it pretty much on a daily basis. Anything from tech news digest, to niche