In this session, I will discuss options for acquiring social media data, including collecting it yourself, locating and re-using existing datasets, purchasing data, or using a social media service provider.

For collecting and re-using datasets, I will demonstrate Social Feed Manager and TweetSets. Social Feed Manager is software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo. TweetSets supports creating custom Twitter datasets from existing datasets. Both are open-source software developed at George Washington University Libraries.

Depending on participant interest, additional topics for discussion might include research ethics and privacy considerations, collecting Facebook data, an introduction to APIs, comparing web archiving and API-based social media archiving, or anything else social media-related that participants would like to discuss.