BuzzFeed News Senior Reporter Lam Thuy Vo explains how to mine, process, and analyze data from the social web in meaningful ways with the Python programming language.

Did fake Twitter accounts help sway a presidential election? What can Facebook and Reddit archives tell us about human behavior? In Mining Social Media, senior BuzzFeed reporter Lam Thuy Vo shows you how to use Python and key data analysis tools to find the stories buried in social media.

Whether you're a professional journalist, an academic researcher, or a citizen investigator, 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

Social media is filled with thousands of hidden stories just waiting to be told. Learn to use the data-sleuthing tools that professionals use to write your own data-driven stories.

Q&A with Author Lam Thuy Vo

Why did you write Mining Social Media?

We have become the largest producers of data in history. Almost every click online, each swipe on our tablets and each tap on our smartphone produces a data point in a virtual repository. As more and more people conduct their lives online, and as smartphones are penetrating previously unconnected regions around the world, this trove of stories is only becoming larger.

At present, most researchers treat each social media user like they would an individual subject — as anecdotes and single points of contact. But to do so with a handful of tweets and Instagram posts is to ignore the potential of hundreds of millions of others. Many stories and findings lie dormant in the vast amounts of data produced by everyday consumers because researchers and journalists are still only starting to acquire the large-scale data-wrangling expertise needed to tap them.

Who is this book intended for?

This book is primarily written with researchers in mind, which I will broadly define as social scientists, lawyers, linguists, academics, educators, activists, and journalists. People who have more commercial applications for this kind of research in mind, like marketers or publicists, may also find value in understanding the social web. In terms of skill sets, this book is targeted at people who come with little to no previous programming experience and aims to bring a conceptual understanding of programming to practical exercises for people who are excited to dive into coding for the first time.

What do you want readers to take away from the book?

I want them to feel empowered. Technology and in particular social media plays a huge role in people's lives but few are provided the tools or resources to learn how to better understand it. Learning how to code and how to analyze data, in particular, can seem like a daunting task and I wanted to create a resource that complete novices can use to learn the skills they need to make more sense of social media. Through this book, I hope to show that coding is not just a way to build a bot or to build an app but that it can be a means for exploring one’s curiosity in a world that is increasingly dependent on technology.

Review

"If you want to know a little bit about Data Science while learning Python along the way, Mining Social Media is a must read . . . It's a fun and hands on approach to the topic, and I'd love to have read this when I was starting coding!"

—Gonçalo Palma, @GonPalma

"Excellently written, with complex topics made easy to understand, and has a welcoming style of prose."

—Ryan K. Louie, MD, PhD, @ryanlouie

"If you haven't read Lam's book, Mining Social Media, trust us — you're gonna dig it."

—Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, @newmarkjschool

About the Author

Lam Thuy Vo is a senior reporter at BuzzFeed News where she focuses on the intersection of technology, society, and social media data. She has reported for The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, and NPR's Planet Money, telling economic stories across the US and throughout Asia. Vo has also spent over a decade as an educator, training newsrooms and developing courses for the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.