Reading Social Media into Data: Manually, through JSON, and through R

In this video, we think about analyzing social media, which means breaking it down into its constituent parts and considering how those parts systematically interrelate. One method for doing so is to literally read the content of the resulting web pages on social media platforms. Another method would be direct database access. The former isn't scalable and the latter isn't practically feasible for large social media platforms. JSON is a useful method for speaking to computers but is almost illegible when data has many variables and many cases. To obtain a dataset in a legible structure that is amenable for analysis, I demonstrate the usefulness of simple scripts in the research program called R.
This video is recorded by Associate Professor of Sociology James Cook for the University of Maine at Augusta Social Science program.