Wednesday 27th November 2024, 13:30–17:00 (Australia/Melbourne), Drawing Room
This workshop will introduce participants to open source R packages for online network collection and analysis, developed by the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab (http://vosonlab.net) at the Australian National University. The workshop will include an introduction to (depending on workshop participant interest and available API access):
- vosonSML (https://github.com/vosonlab/vosonSML) - an R package providing a suite of tools for collecting and constructing networks from social media data. It provides easy-to-use functions for collecting data across popular platforms (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, WWW hyperlinks, Mastodon) and generating different types of networks for analysis.
- VOSON Dashboard (https://github.com/vosonlab/VOSONDash) - an R/Shiny application providing a graphical user interface for collecting and analysing online networks and associated text data. It builds on a number of R packages, in particular igraph (for network analysis) and vosonSML.
Participants will be shown how to install these packages and their basic operation. Workshop materials will include R scripts, package documentation, notes on analysis of online networks, and examples of research.
Robert Ackland holds a PhD in economics and is a professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU), specialising in social network analysis, computational social science and the social science of the Internet. Robert leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab (http://vosonlab.net) which he established in 2005 under an ARC Special Research Initiative (e-Research) grant. Robert is a long-term instructor for the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Inc. (ACSPRI), and is currently the Chair of ACSPRI.