First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for organizations?
Hi folks. This is an incredibly simple question, and I told my colleagues that I was sure someone (probably many) on AoIR knows the answer to this. I have a study with 2000 organizations (and their official names) and wish to find out their main twitter account. Twitter has a public directory, but it's browse only. I'm sure a quick script could take the table of org names, apply it to some aspect of a twitter API or twitter database and return a list. But I'm not trained in that really cool and powerful set of approaches. However, I'm also sure there is in fact already existing a twitter directory where you could enter the organization name and get the account. The paleolithic approach is to search each of the 2000 websites (which we have) to see if there's a twitter account posted; or worse, type the org name and "twitter" in Google search. Anyone have a suggestion? Thanks, so much, in advance. -- Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Department of Communication 4127 SS&MS Bldg Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 805-893-8696; rrice@comm.ucsb.edu https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice [image: UC Santa Barbara]
Hi Ronald, yes it can be done, using R and the package rtweet. As for the YouTube question in the other, a similar approach could be done with R and the package Tuber. It probably needs a "do for" loop. Not sure rtweet (beware, technical lingo ahead) is vectorized for this problem. A loop will take some time though, given the large number of organizations. Furthermore, because one query will return multiple results, some semi-manual evaluation needs to take place to asses which account is the actual account. But, anyone with some experience with R could do it. Hope that herlps. best regards Maurice ________________________________________________ Maurice Vergeer www.mauricevergeer.nl ________________________________________________ ________________________________________ Van: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> namens Ronald Rice <rrice@comm.ucsb.edu> Verzonden: zaterdag 5 september 2020 01:46 Aan: AoIR-L Onderwerp: [Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for organizations? Hi folks. This is an incredibly simple question, and I told my colleagues that I was sure someone (probably many) on AoIR knows the answer to this. I have a study with 2000 organizations (and their official names) and wish to find out their main twitter account. Twitter has a public directory, but it's browse only. I'm sure a quick script could take the table of org names, apply it to some aspect of a twitter API or twitter database and return a list. But I'm not trained in that really cool and powerful set of approaches. However, I'm also sure there is in fact already existing a twitter directory where you could enter the organization name and get the account. The paleolithic approach is to search each of the 2000 websites (which we have) to see if there's a twitter account posted; or worse, type the org name and "twitter" in Google search. Anyone have a suggestion? Thanks, so much, in advance. -- Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Department of Communication 4127 SS&MS Bldg Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 805-893-8696; rrice@comm.ucsb.edu https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice [image: UC Santa Barbara] _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
I would add that Maurice points to the non-trivial task of disambiguation when an organization name overlaps terms in common usage. For example, United Airlines is an organization, but it is most commonly referred to as United. Manchester United is a very popular football organization, most often referred to as United. The list of other widespread uses of this common organization name sums up the disambiguation problem. It can be done with training and machine-learning, but not for 2000 terms unless you have an army of workers and lots of money. That suggests a second point, essentially that the practical steps required to gather data for 2000 organizations over time and remain compliant with rate and query limits would be daunting. You might consider trying the task with 5 organizations to assess the challenge of performing the task at scale. Finally, from the view of qualitative research, depending on your end goals, you may not need such a huge number of organizations to reach saturation during analysis. That is, say you looked at 50 organizations and then noticed on 51-60 that you were not learning much you had not already learned. That is saturation. On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 6:08 AM Vergeer, M.R.M. (Maurice) < m.vergeer@maw.ru.nl> wrote:
Hi Ronald,
yes it can be done, using R and the package rtweet. As for the YouTube question in the other, a similar approach could be done with R and the package Tuber. It probably needs a "do for" loop. Not sure rtweet (beware, technical lingo ahead) is vectorized for this problem. A loop will take some time though, given the large number of organizations. Furthermore, because one query will return multiple results, some semi-manual evaluation needs to take place to asses which account is the actual account. But, anyone with some experience with R could do it. Hope that herlps.
best regards Maurice
________________________________________________ Maurice Vergeer www.mauricevergeer.nl
________________________________________________
________________________________________ Van: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> namens Ronald Rice < rrice@comm.ucsb.edu> Verzonden: zaterdag 5 september 2020 01:46 Aan: AoIR-L Onderwerp: [Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for organizations?
Hi folks. This is an incredibly simple question, and I told my colleagues that I was sure someone (probably many) on AoIR knows the answer to this. I have a study with 2000 organizations (and their official names) and wish to find out their main twitter account. Twitter has a public directory, but it's browse only. I'm sure a quick script could take the table of org names, apply it to some aspect of a twitter API or twitter database and return a list. But I'm not trained in that really cool and powerful set of approaches. However, I'm also sure there is in fact already existing a twitter directory where you could enter the organization name and get the account. The paleolithic approach is to search each of the 2000 websites (which we have) to see if there's a twitter account posted; or worse, type the org name and "twitter" in Google search. Anyone have a suggestion? Thanks, so much, in advance. -- Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Department of Communication 4127 SS&MS Bldg Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 805-893-8696; rrice@comm.ucsb.edu https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice [image: UC Santa Barbara] _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Founder and CEO, Texifter Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*
As others have pointed out, the idea of automating the organization name -> twitter account lookup has all sorts of potential failure modes. Nevertheless, as a little experiment I thought it might be interesting to see if it were possible to automate this little heuristic: 1. Search for the organization on Wikipedia. 2. Look in the Wikipedia article for the "official website" link. 3. Look for a Twitter account on the organization's homepage. I gave it a try in a Jupyter notebook [1] and wrote a few words about it [2] if you want to take a look. Of course this approach relies entirely on there being a Wikipedia article in the first place. It's basically a house of cards waiting to fall down :-) But if you want me to try running it on your list we could give it a try. //Ed [1] https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1OfKcSrwm3Q1VaLIiply5zz6cCDX_QdFJ?us... [2] https://inkdroid.org/2020/09/05/organizations-on-twitter/
Hi, Ronald et al., This is an interesting thread, and Ed, thanks for sharing that post with us all. I'm speaking as someone, who did *not *initially automate this process of searching for orgs' social media accounts, but one thing I wanted to add that if you do want to get technical and/or exhaustive about this, it may be worth using Wayback to double check that the social media accounts currently associated with an org weren't preceded/predated by others. These days, there's a lot of org accounts disappearing overnight with very little heads up. In my own case, I have spent much of the past five years searching for, cataloguing, and tracking over approx. 2927 Twitter accounts associated with the U.S. federal government. I built on that project this summer by documenting all the social media accounts run by US state-level public health departments. I don't necessarily recommend you go the manual road on this but wanted to share a few observations from the process. I began this journey years ago by going individually to each US fed agency's homepage and seeing which official social media accounts were listed. I then cross-checked this process by searching for each agency's name in Twitter. Another level of checking entailed seeing which accounts the govt agencies themselves were following. Some initiatives have popped up over the years to try to keep track of govt Twitter accounts (Politwoops and Voxgov and even Digital.gov), but they are far from exhaustive. I guess I'm saying this, because it's good to remember that many orgs these days will have one primary Twitter account but then will launch smaller accounts related to specific initiatives/campaigns/etc. Often, it's really hard to find these unless you dig into who specific accounts are following. Anecdotally, I also wanted to add that a lot of orgs these days aren't updating their homepages webpages to reflect the full extent of their social media presence, in part because many are continuing to experiment with the platforms that work best for their mission. Muira On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 7:42 AM Shulman, Stu <stu@texifter.com> wrote:
I would add that Maurice points to the non-trivial task of disambiguation when an organization name overlaps terms in common usage. For example, United Airlines is an organization, but it is most commonly referred to as United. Manchester United is a very popular football organization, most often referred to as United. The list of other widespread uses of this common organization name sums up the disambiguation problem. It can be done with training and machine-learning, but not for 2000 terms unless you have an army of workers and lots of money. That suggests a second point, essentially that the practical steps required to gather data for 2000 organizations over time and remain compliant with rate and query limits would be daunting. You might consider trying the task with 5 organizations to assess the challenge of performing the task at scale. Finally, from the view of qualitative research, depending on your end goals, you may not need such a huge number of organizations to reach saturation during analysis. That is, say you looked at 50 organizations and then noticed on 51-60 that you were not learning much you had not already learned. That is saturation.
On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 6:08 AM Vergeer, M.R.M. (Maurice) < m.vergeer@maw.ru.nl> wrote:
Hi Ronald,
yes it can be done, using R and the package rtweet. As for the YouTube question in the other, a similar approach could be done with R and the package Tuber. It probably needs a "do for" loop. Not sure rtweet (beware, technical lingo ahead) is vectorized for this problem. A loop will take some time though, given the large number of organizations. Furthermore, because one query will return multiple results, some semi-manual evaluation needs to take place to asses which account is the actual account. But, anyone with some experience with R could do it. Hope that herlps.
best regards Maurice
________________________________________________ Maurice Vergeer www.mauricevergeer.nl
________________________________________________
________________________________________ Van: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> namens Ronald Rice < rrice@comm.ucsb.edu> Verzonden: zaterdag 5 september 2020 01:46 Aan: AoIR-L Onderwerp: [Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for organizations?
Hi folks. This is an incredibly simple question, and I told my colleagues that I was sure someone (probably many) on AoIR knows the answer to this. I have a study with 2000 organizations (and their official names) and wish to find out their main twitter account. Twitter has a public directory, but it's browse only. I'm sure a quick script could take the table of org names, apply it to some aspect of a twitter API or twitter database and return a list. But I'm not trained in that really cool and powerful set of approaches. However, I'm also sure there is in fact already existing a twitter directory where you could enter the organization name and get the account. The paleolithic approach is to search each of the 2000 websites (which we have) to see if there's a twitter account posted; or worse, type the org name and "twitter" in Google search. Anyone have a suggestion? Thanks, so much, in advance. -- Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Department of Communication 4127 SS&MS Bldg Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 805-893-8696; rrice@comm.ucsb.edu https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice [image: UC Santa Barbara] _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Founder and CEO, Texifter Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics* _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- *Muira McCammon* *Ph.D. candidate, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania M.L., University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020)M.A. in Translation Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2016) A bit about my research here <https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-grad-student-studies-information-flow-Guantanamo-Bay-Gitmo-detention-center>Twitter: @muira_mccammonPlease note that I am working more flexibly and I may send and respond to emails out of hours - there is no expectation or desire that you do the same. *
We have this matching problem at my job where I get a list of business names and street addresses or websites and have to match them to businesses on our national business survey frame. This links to their tax data. I know that is not Internet related but the matching problem is a common enough problem i believe in computer science. I also need sometimes to search a web site like www.catspics.com to find the real company name like 'media 3d' in the 'terms of use' page or 'privacy policy' page. I have not been able to automate this yet. I have tried with R and the rvest package but the web sites tend to be heterogeneous and canned CMS sites with very little CSS or HTML5 exposed to gather. On Sat., Sep. 5, 2020, 9:33 p.m. Muira McCammon, <muira.n.mccammon@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, Ronald et al.,
This is an interesting thread, and Ed, thanks for sharing that post with us all.
I'm speaking as someone, who did *not *initially automate this process of searching for orgs' social media accounts, but one thing I wanted to add that if you do want to get technical and/or exhaustive about this, it may be worth using Wayback to double check that the social media accounts currently associated with an org weren't preceded/predated by others. These days, there's a lot of org accounts disappearing overnight with very little heads up.
In my own case, I have spent much of the past five years searching for, cataloguing, and tracking over approx. 2927 Twitter accounts associated with the U.S. federal government. I built on that project this summer by documenting all the social media accounts run by US state-level public health departments. I don't necessarily recommend you go the manual road on this but wanted to share a few observations from the process.
I began this journey years ago by going individually to each US fed agency's homepage and seeing which official social media accounts were listed. I then cross-checked this process by searching for each agency's name in Twitter. Another level of checking entailed seeing which accounts the govt agencies themselves were following. Some initiatives have popped up over the years to try to keep track of govt Twitter accounts (Politwoops and Voxgov and even Digital.gov), but they are far from exhaustive. I guess I'm saying this, because it's good to remember that many orgs these days will have one primary Twitter account but then will launch smaller accounts related to specific initiatives/campaigns/etc. Often, it's really hard to find these unless you dig into who specific accounts are following.
Anecdotally, I also wanted to add that a lot of orgs these days aren't updating their homepages webpages to reflect the full extent of their social media presence, in part because many are continuing to experiment with the platforms that work best for their mission.
Muira
On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 7:42 AM Shulman, Stu <stu@texifter.com> wrote:
I would add that Maurice points to the non-trivial task of disambiguation when an organization name overlaps terms in common usage. For example, United Airlines is an organization, but it is most commonly referred to as United. Manchester United is a very popular football organization, most often referred to as United. The list of other widespread uses of this common organization name sums up the disambiguation problem. It can be done with training and machine-learning, but not for 2000 terms unless you have an army of workers and lots of money. That suggests a second point, essentially that the practical steps required to gather data for 2000 organizations over time and remain compliant with rate and query limits would be daunting. You might consider trying the task with 5 organizations to assess the challenge of performing the task at scale. Finally, from the view of qualitative research, depending on your end goals, you may not need such a huge number of organizations to reach saturation during analysis. That is, say you looked at 50 organizations and then noticed on 51-60 that you were not learning much you had not already learned. That is saturation.
On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 6:08 AM Vergeer, M.R.M. (Maurice) < m.vergeer@maw.ru.nl> wrote:
Hi Ronald,
yes it can be done, using R and the package rtweet. As for the YouTube question in the other, a similar approach could be done with R and the package Tuber. It probably needs a "do for" loop. Not sure rtweet (beware, technical lingo ahead) is vectorized for this problem. A loop will take some time though, given the large number of organizations. Furthermore, because one query will return multiple results, some semi-manual evaluation needs to take place to asses which account is the actual account. But, anyone with some experience with R could do it. Hope that herlps.
best regards Maurice
________________________________________________ Maurice Vergeer www.mauricevergeer.nl
________________________________________________
________________________________________ Van: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> namens Ronald Rice < rrice@comm.ucsb.edu> Verzonden: zaterdag 5 september 2020 01:46 Aan: AoIR-L Onderwerp: [Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for organizations?
Hi folks. This is an incredibly simple question, and I told my colleagues that I was sure someone (probably many) on AoIR knows the answer to this. I have a study with 2000 organizations (and their official names) and wish to find out their main twitter account. Twitter has a public directory, but it's browse only. I'm sure a quick script could take the table of org names, apply it to some aspect of a twitter API or twitter database and return a list. But I'm not trained in that really cool and powerful set of approaches. However, I'm also sure there is in fact already existing a twitter directory where you could enter the organization name and get the account. The paleolithic approach is to search each of the 2000 websites (which we have) to see if there's a twitter account posted; or worse, type the org name and "twitter" in Google search. Anyone have a suggestion? Thanks, so much, in advance. -- Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Department of Communication 4127 SS&MS Bldg Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 805-893-8696; rrice@comm.ucsb.edu https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice [image: UC Santa Barbara] _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Dr. Stuart W. Shulman Founder and CEO, Texifter Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics* _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- *Muira McCammon*
*Ph.D. candidate, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania M.L., University of Pennsylvania Law School (2020)M.A. in Translation Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2016) A bit about my research here < https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-grad-student-studies-information-flow-...
Twitter: @muira_mccammonPlease note that I am working more flexibly and I may send and respond to emails out of hours - there is no expectation or desire that you do the same. *
The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Hi all, interestingly, though identifying accounts is a common task, no common protocols or methods have evolved so far. Cross-checking web links, directories, social media search and so on is definitely nessessary to get high quality lists. Each of the source brings its own bias. I'd like to add one point from my experience. Some time ago, we systematically compared sampling accounts of German political organizations using traditional organization directories (the Oeckl) with online directories (plugragraph). The online source most likely will bias your sample towards more active accounts. Depending on the research question, this poses problems (for example, if you analyse activity indicators such as number of posts/comments/likes/shares). Best Jakob Am 06.09.2020 um 03:32 schrieb Muira McCammon:
I began this journey years ago by going individually to each US fed agency's homepage and seeing which official social media accounts were listed. I then cross-checked this process by searching for each agency's name in Twitter. Another level of checking entailed seeing which accounts the govt agencies themselves were following. Some initiatives have popped up over the years to try to keep track of govt Twitter accounts (Politwoops and Voxgov and even Digital.gov), but they are far from exhaustive. I guess I'm saying this, because it's good to remember that many orgs these days will have one primary Twitter account but then will launch smaller accounts related to specific initiatives/campaigns/etc. Often, it's really hard to find these unless you dig into who specific accounts are following.
-- Jakob Jünger University of Greifswald Institute of Political Science and Communication Studies Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz 3 17487 Greifswald Germany Room: 3.16 (3. floor) Email: jakob.juenger@uni-greifswald.de Phone : +49 3834 420 3444 or +49 173 860 8056 Web: http://www.ipk.uni-greifswald.de/
Thanks to some very thoughtful and generous folks who have provided various suggestions as well as caveats, such as the instability of sites and accounts, the lack of standard procedures, and multiple forms of selectivity. We will soon be exploring some of the suggestions, but more are welcome! I will summarize and post all the suggestions and resources down the road. It's such a treat to be a part of the AoIR community. Thanks! On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 12:43 AM Jakob Jünger < jakob.juenger@uni-greifswald.de> wrote:
Hi all,
interestingly, though identifying accounts is a common task, no common protocols or methods have evolved so far. Cross-checking web links, directories, social media search and so on is definitely nessessary to get high quality lists. Each of the source brings its own bias.
I'd like to add one point from my experience. Some time ago, we systematically compared sampling accounts of German political organizations using traditional organization directories (the Oeckl) with online directories (plugragraph). The online source most likely will bias your sample towards more active accounts. Depending on the research question, this poses problems (for example, if you analyse activity indicators such as number of posts/comments/likes/shares).
Best Jakob
Am 06.09.2020 um 03:32 schrieb Muira McCammon:
I began this journey years ago by going individually to each US fed agency's homepage and seeing which official social media accounts were listed. I then cross-checked this process by searching for each agency's name in Twitter. Another level of checking entailed seeing which accounts the govt agencies themselves were following. Some initiatives have popped up over the years to try to keep track of govt Twitter accounts (Politwoops and Voxgov and even Digital.gov), but they are far from exhaustive. I guess I'm saying this, because it's good to remember that many orgs these days will have one primary Twitter account but then will launch smaller accounts related to specific initiatives/campaigns/etc. Often, it's really hard to find these unless you dig into who specific accounts are following.
-- Jakob Jünger University of Greifswald Institute of Political Science and Communication Studies
Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz 3 17487 Greifswald Germany
Room: 3.16 (3. floor) Email: jakob.juenger@uni-greifswald.de Phone : +49 3834 420 3444 or +49 173 860 8056 Web: http://www.ipk.uni-greifswald.de/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Department of Communication 4127 SS&MS Bldg Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 805-893-8696; rrice@comm.ucsb.edu https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice [image: UC Santa Barbara]
An interesting discussion. I have done something similar for the EU's accounts before. I needed to collect twitter accounts of EU institutions and prominent figures such as commissioners and members of the European Parliament. The EU was professional enough to have all the information on a few very well designed web-pages so it was mostly a simple html scraping (I used R and rvest) to identify entities required for my project and their twitter accounts. Although, I had to validate the list by hand several times to make sure that I was getting what I wanted. The tricky bit was when there was no link to social media accounts on the web-pages. It turns out Google is pretty good at identifying the right social media accounts if you look up the names of these organizations or people. I did by hand because I am not well versed enough in web-scraping to integrate google searches to my script and there were not many problematic entities, but one can potentially do something like: 1) Create a list of names of organizations and people 2) Look them up on google 3) Scrape the returned page and extract the social media information 4) add the social media account information to your social media scraper. I think step 2 and 3 can be done by using Selenium but as I said, I don't know that much about web-scraping. There is also the iffy part of scraping/crawling google... Best, Sina Özdemir Ph.D. Candidate NTNU, Trondheim M.A Comparative and International Studies ETH Zurich & University of Zurich, Switzerland B.A. Political Science and International Relations Middle East Technical University, Turkey
-----Original Message----- From: Air-L <air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org> On Behalf Of Ronald Rice Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2020 9:54 AM To: AoIR-L <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] First simple request: directory of twitter accounts for organizations?
Thanks to some very thoughtful and generous folks who have provided various suggestions as well as caveats, such as the instability of sites and accounts, the lack of standard procedures, and multiple forms of selectivity. We will soon be exploring some of the suggestions, but more are welcome! I will summarize and post all the suggestions and resources down the road. It's such a treat to be a part of the AoIR community. Thanks!
On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 12:43 AM Jakob Jünger < jakob.juenger@uni- greifswald.de> wrote:
Hi all,
interestingly, though identifying accounts is a common task, no common protocols or methods have evolved so far. Cross-checking web links, directories, social media search and so on is definitely nessessary to get high quality lists. Each of the source brings its own bias.
I'd like to add one point from my experience. Some time ago, we systematically compared sampling accounts of German political organizations using traditional organization directories (the Oeckl) with online directories (plugragraph). The online source most likely will bias your sample towards more active accounts. Depending on the research question, this poses problems (for example, if you analyse activity indicators such as number of posts/comments/likes/shares).
Best Jakob
Am 06.09.2020 um 03:32 schrieb Muira McCammon:
I began this journey years ago by going individually to each U.S. fed agency's homepage and seeing which official social media accounts were listed. I then cross-checked this process by searching for each agency's name in Twitter. Another level of checking entailed seeing which accounts the govt agencies themselves were following. Some initiatives have popped up over the years to try to keep track of govt Twitter accounts (Politwoops and Voxgov and even Digital.gov), but they are far from exhaustive. I guess I'm saying this, because it's good to remember that many orgs these days will have one primary Twitter account but then will launch smaller accounts related to specific initiatives/campaigns/etc. Often, it's really hard to find these unless you dig into who specific accounts are following.
-- Jakob Jünger University of Greifswald Institute of Political Science and Communication Studies
Ernst-Lohmeyer-Platz 3 17487 Greifswald Germany
Room: 3.16 (3. floor) Email: jakob.juenger@uni-greifswald.de Phone : +49 3834 420 3444 or +49 173 860 8056 Web: http://www.ipk.uni-greifswald.de/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Ronald E. Rice Arthur N. Rupe Professor in the Social Effects of Mass Communication Department of Communication 4127 SS&MS Bldg Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4020 805-893-8696; rrice@comm.ucsb.edu https://www.comm.ucsb.edu/people/ronald-e-rice [image: UC Santa Barbara] _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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participants (8)
-
Ed Summers -
Jakob Jünger -
Muira McCammon -
Peter Timusk -
Ronald Rice -
Shulman, Stu -
Sina Furkan Özdemir -
Vergeer, M.R.M. (Maurice)