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A Semi-automatic Method to Retrieve Twitter Accounts

A Semi-automatic Method to Retrieve Twitter Accounts AbstractAlthough Twitter has become a major source of data, research still relies on heavy manual searches to find the accounts of a population of interest, such as members of Parliament, members of an association or candidates to an election. In this article, we propose a method to semi-automatically retrieve those accounts. After creating a pool of possible accounts through automatic web searches, we select a unique account for each member of a defined group. To do so, we use a simplified version of the minimax regret approach, on a score based on the account’s handle and the tweets’ content. We test this method to find the accounts of the candidates for the 2015 Spanish general elections and the members of the 57th House of Commons in the United Kingdom. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Statistics, Politics and Policy de Gruyter

A Semi-automatic Method to Retrieve Twitter Accounts

Nocca, Florence
Statistics, Politics and Policy , Volume 8 (2): 13 – Dec 20, 2017
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13 pages

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2151-7509
eISSN
2151-7509
DOI
10.1515/spp-2017-0011
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractAlthough Twitter has become a major source of data, research still relies on heavy manual searches to find the accounts of a population of interest, such as members of Parliament, members of an association or candidates to an election. In this article, we propose a method to semi-automatically retrieve those accounts. After creating a pool of possible accounts through automatic web searches, we select a unique account for each member of a defined group. To do so, we use a simplified version of the minimax regret approach, on a score based on the account’s handle and the tweets’ content. We test this method to find the accounts of the candidates for the 2015 Spanish general elections and the members of the 57th House of Commons in the United Kingdom.

Journal

Statistics, Politics and Policy – de Gruyter

Published: Dec 20, 2017

References

  • Social Media as Beat: Tweets as a News Source During the 2010 British and Dutch Elections