Mining Social Media
Oh yay! You found the web-version of the book Mining Social Media! Here you can learn how to mine, process, and analyze data from the social web in meaningful ways with the Python programming language.
On the pages of this web site 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 to:
- Write Python scripts and use APIs to gather data from the social web
- Download data archives and dig through them for insights
- Inspect HTML downloaded from websites for useful content
- Format, aggregate, sort, and filter your collected data using Google Sheets
- Create data visualizations to illustrate your discoveries
- Perform advanced data analysis using Python, Jupyter Notebooks, and the pandas library
- Apply what you’ve learned to research topics on your own
My publishers at No Starch and I really wanted to ensure that people of all socioeconomic backgrounds have access to this book, so this is a free version of it. But if you do have the means and would like to support us, you can buy a copy of the ebook or the physical book at No Starch Press.
About the author
Lam Thuy Vo is a journalist who marries data analysis with on-the-ground reporting to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is currently a Soros Justice Fellow, an AI Accountability Network Fellow for the Pulitzer Center, and a data-journalist-in-residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. As an independent reporter she has worked with Documented, ProPublica, the Guardian, the New York Times and ESPN. Previously, she was a journalist at BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR’s Planet Money.
She has told stories at the intersection of economics, technology and society for more than a decade and has documented how power imbalances, when baked into systems, adversely impact those who are already living on the margins. She has documented how excessive ‘quality-of-life’ complaints led to the over-policing of minorities and the raids of Black-owned businesses. She has looked into how changes in immigration enforcement drove immigrants into the arms of fraudulent lawyers. And she has looked into the powerful role that technology has played in the surveillance of teens, the policing of protesters, and the perpetuation of anti-Muslim hate by Myanmar politicians.
She’s won or been nominated for more than 30 awards for her work as a reporter, storyteller and leader in the field. Among the organizations that have recognized her work are the Overseas Press Club, the Online News Association, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the Poynter Institute.
She has also worked as an educator, scholar and public speaker for a decade, developing newsroom-wide training programs for institutions like Al Jazeera America and The Wall Street Journal; workshops for journalists across the US as well as from Asia, Latin America and Europe, and semester-long courses for the Craig Newmark CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She’s brought her research about misinformation and the impact of algorithms on our political views to institutions like Harvard, MIT, Columbia and Data and Society. In 2019, she published a book about her empirical approach to finding stories in data from the Internet for No Starch Press.
She is also committed to helping her industry become more diverse. She co-administers a slack community for journalists of color and co-created a resource guide for journalists of color looking for career growth, salary data, demographics breakdowns of newsrooms and training opportunities.
A German-born Vietnamese immigrant, she made her way to New York City via London, Berlin, Hong Kong and Oakland and has adopted continuous learning as a way of life. She taught herself how to code by making data visualizations about breakups; she learned how to use a hammer drill to build inclusive rock climbing routes on the sides of the Rocky Mountains; and she will always mosey her way into the kitchens of ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ who are willing to show her how to make their favorite home-cooked meals.