PeerJ Computer Science (Oct 2016)

OSoMe: the IUNI observatory on social media

  • Clayton A. Davis,
  • Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia,
  • Luca Maria Aiello,
  • Keychul Chung,
  • Michael D. Conover,
  • Emilio Ferrara,
  • Alessandro Flammini,
  • Geoffrey C. Fox,
  • Xiaoming Gao,
  • Bruno Gonçalves,
  • Przemyslaw A. Grabowicz,
  • Kibeom Hong,
  • Pik-Mai Hui,
  • Scott McCaulay,
  • Karissa McKelvey,
  • Mark R. Meiss,
  • Snehal Patil,
  • Chathuri Peli Kankanamalage,
  • Valentin Pentchev,
  • Judy Qiu,
  • Jacob Ratkiewicz,
  • Alex Rudnick,
  • Benjamin Serrette,
  • Prashant Shiralkar,
  • Onur Varol,
  • Lilian Weng,
  • Tak-Lon Wu,
  • Andrew J. Younge,
  • Filippo Menczer

DOI
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.87
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2
p. e87

Abstract

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The study of social phenomena is becoming increasingly reliant on big data from online social networks. Broad access to social media data, however, requires software development skills that not all researchers possess. Here we present the IUNI Observatory on Social Media, an open analytics platform designed to facilitate computational social science. The system leverages a historical, ongoing collection of over 70 billion public messages from Twitter. We illustrate a number of interactive open-source tools to retrieve, visualize, and analyze derived data from this collection. The Observatory, now available at osome.iuni.iu.edu, is the result of a large, six-year collaborative effort coordinated by the Indiana University Network Science Institute.

Keywords