My Favourite Tipples from a Twitter research expert
Jinfo Blog

By Wasim Ahmed

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Wasim Ahmed, a social media researcher and consultant who shares his favourite sources in the area of social listening, Twitter and analysis.

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I'm a PhD candidate and research associate currently carrying out research into using Twitter data to provide insights into health conditions and health-related events. My interests include health informatics, social media and data mining and the Tipples I've selected reflect these. 

• The New Social Media New Social Science Twitter network, Twitter account, and blog: Some of my favourite people within the field contribute to this hashtag and account on a regular basis. For instance, recent articles in the field, blog posts, events, and so forth will be shared frequently. This network has really helped increase my knowledge of social media research, and I have been able to network with some really great people. I would highly recommend this network to academics and anyone else looking to conduct social media research. 

• Impact Blog: From the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, the Impact Blog is a fantastic resource for social media scholars. I would highly recommend taking a look at the social media sub-section which contains a host of excellent posts concerning various aspects of social media research. My favourite resource on the Impact Blog (written by me!) which I refer my students to is a post about software which can be used to capture data from Twitter.

• NodeXL: This is a Microsoft Excel plugin which can be used to capture and analyse data from a number of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The NodeXL graph gallery contains a host of keywords and hashtags which have been analysed and visualised stretching back a few years. I know many students who have used analysis produced in the graph gallery in their dissertations.

• Visibrain: This tool analyses social media topics in real-time, and the blog contains a host of previous topics which have been visualised and analysed, such as the recent US elections. Accessing data in order to gain insight into certain topics can be costly, and the Visibrain blog is a great resource of high quality blog posts on a range of issues.

 For fun:

• Pulsar blog: A source I refer to for non-work related reasons is the Pulsar blog, which contains up-to-date and relevant news relating to social media. Pulsar is world-leading in social listening, and the blog is a great way to keep up to date with developments within the social data industry.

An article in Jinfo I found particularly interesting:

• One of my favourite recent articles was by Shimrit Janes titled "Applying lessons learned from current awareness to data analytics". Information professionals may have strong skills in the area of current awareness and the post looked at how informational professionals could evolve this process in order to apply those skills to the field of data analytics. 

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