Friday 8 July 2011

Data Collection Methods – Twitter

One of the technological risk factors identified for this pilot project is the possibility of failing to successfully archive themed Twitter conversations, live Twitter chats, and general Twitter engagement and development for @IOCT_DMUMaster.

In seeking to address this issue and minimise the risk of losing critical data, I have investigated and set up free statistical and analytical tools suitable for quantitative and qualitative data for the pilot project: -

Archivist offers a way to save and analyse tweets using visualisations and graphic representations of captured data. Data includes numbers of tweets, top users, ratio of tweets vs re-tweets and top words.


Mention Map displays an interactive visualisation of any Twitter account network, highlighting which people the account holder interacts with the most and details hash tagged conversations.

Twitter Counter is a service that will send weekly email updates and shows graphic quantitative representations of numbers of followers, numbers of people following and number of tweets for @IOCT_DMUMasters

I would have liked to have used TweetSheep to provides information about followers analysing words found in their profiles, however I was unable to access their website.

TweetStats
proved unsuccessful in providing information on the Masters account because of a vast number of users requesting information.

After researching various methods and tools, it seems that TwapperKeeper although complicated to set up, will be the most useful tool to freely record tweets from live Twitter chats. I will run a preliminary live chat to test TwapperKeeper.

2 comments:

  1. Testing is important. How will you analyse Tweets using TwapperKeeper? What evaluation risks do you run by focusing on one tool/process?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I intend to use TwapperKeeper to keep a record of the live chat Twitter element of the project as evidence of the activity. This will be evaluated through my own observation as the chat moderator and through feedback from the participants via end of project questionnaire. Using principles of triangulation, I will be analysing the data in relation to my observations and feedback from participants.

    ReplyDelete