Playing with Social Media Analysis

I’m currently dipping in and out of the Future Learn course  on Social Media Analytics. The activities of the course are centred on analysing a body of Twitter data gathered using Martin Hawksey’s excellent TAGs. I used a set of tweets posted in response to plans to planned changes at the Open University by the then Vice Chancellor, Peter Horrocks. The tweets were aggregated with the hashtags #SaveOpenUni or #SavetheOU and collected from the 14 March 2018. To date, this has resulted in an archive of 5,501 tweets with the vast bulk of the tweets being in March – May 2018 (Peter Horrocks resigned as Vice Chancellor in April 2018) but the most recent tweet was on 2 October 2018.

As might be expected, the controversial (and since shelved) plans for the OU mobilised a good deal of discussion in the academic community at large and, I suspect, particularly between OU staff. An initial visualisation of the archive indicates a good deal of interactions around these two hashtags.

 

The next part of the course will involve analysing the archive using Tableau and I’ll be posting on my activities using Tableau in the next post.

 

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