randomosity

In Min­ing the Social Web Mat­thew A Rus­sell offers to instruct in identi­fy­ing social con­nec­tions, trends in dis­cus­sion and loc­a­tions by tap­ping into social media data. He suc­ceeds in spades. This fast-paced and rich hand­book jumps right into the fray and provides an imme­di­ate and use­ful exer­cise in access­ing the Twit­ter API using python and doing a very quick visu­al­isa­tion of trend­ing sub­jects. I was hooked and greed­ily and imme­di­ately con­sumed a few more of his les­sons. His approach is to go dir­ect to real world applic­a­tions of why you’d want to mine data from social media such as Twit­ter, Buzz, Face­book and util­ise other freely avail­able tools such as Google Maps to look for pat­terns and present solid research findings.

As he asserts, all the user needs is some pro­gram­ming back­ground and a will­ing­ness to learn basic Python tools. Fair require­ments. I am no python wiz­ard, but I found clear instruc­tions and come away feel far more com­fort­able with python and avail­able frame­works after pro­ceed­ing through exer­cises in the book. Rus­sell takes you through exer­cises step by step and provides all the instruc­tion neces­sary to guide you along. The book is hands-on heavy and you do have to be will­ing to play along with goodly chunks of code. This is not a light browsable book. Although it does allow for some skip­ping about, it is the sort of volume that engages with the reader/practitioner and nat­ur­ally leads you along. The exer­cises do assume some degree of back­ground with data ana­lysis. Although expressed in as simple a lan­guage as pos­sible, cer­tainly when get­ting into nat­ural lan­guage pro­cessing for example, some back­ground in gen­eral terms, pro­cesses and meth­od­o­lo­gies in NLP are expec­ted. How­ever, this should not put any­one off and I was impressed that this formed a quick and use­ful intro­duc­tion to the craft because Rus­sell does such a superb job of root­ing the the­ory in every­day lan­guage and practice.

I was sim­il­arly impressed with the authors inclu­sion of exer­cises in min­ing your own mail­box for use­ful ana­lysis and how to con­duct nat­ural lan­guage pro­cessing on blog feeds, not just stick­ing with the sex­ier and trend­ier flashy social media tools today. This is a very com­pre­hens­ive and thought­ful approach to the ava­lanche of explor­able data avail­able from our social exist­ence and Rus­sell provides an extremely approach­able and superbly craf­ted volume. For any­one inter­ested in step­ping bey­ond simple par­ti­cip­a­tion and tak­ing a thought­ful view of how social media is chan­ging our lives, this is the book of ref­er­ence. What’s more I really just simply enjoyed this book. Highly recommended!