A case study of collecting dynamic social data: The pro-ana twitter community

Wood, Ian (2015) 'A Case Study of Collecting Dynamic Social Data: The Pro-Ana Twitter Community'. Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing Systems, 14 (3).

Abstract

The study of social processes in on-line social media content is a relatively new and rapidly growing endeavour. Many social media platforms provide a public API (Application Programming Interface) which can be used for the targeted collection of data from perceived communities, however existing software for this purpose focusses on a â snapshotâ of the community and its communications, and ignores im- portant aspects of its dynamics. We present a data collection system designed to capture tweets and the dynamics of Twitter user profile and friend/follower lists, and an approach to identify a set of tags or keywords that define an on-line community. This approach and system were used to collect a data set spanning 2 years and 7 months (including 3 Christmas periods) from the â pro-anaâ (pro-anorexia) and eating disorder Twitter community.

Publisher

Australian National University, College of Engineering and Computer Science, Department of Computer Science

Rights

CC BY-NC-ND

cbn

Collections

Data Science Institute (Scholarly Articles)