Accessing Social media Data for Research

Links shared during the presentation

Web Scraping with Python & Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup docs

web_scraping_example.ipynb (example using Google Colab)

Using Communalytic to Access Data from YouTube and Reddit Comments

https://communalytic.org/

Setting up YouTube API Key (needed to use w/Communalytic)

General information from Google/YouTube

Summary of steps to set up an API key

1. Log in to the Google cloud console with your google account (can be UH account but doesn’t have to be). https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/dashboard 

You should be able to do the following without signing up for credits.

2. Create a new "Project" or use the default "My Project" then choose Enabled APIs & services from the left menu

3. Click ENABLE APIS AND SERVICES option at top of screen

4. Choose YouTube Data API v3

5. Select Credentials from the left menu

6. Click CREATE CREDENTIALS option at top of screen

7. Select API key option from the popup menu

8. Be sure to copy the key to use in Communalytic YouTube connection (you can always come back to the Google console to get the key or generate a new one)

Other Sources for Social Media Data

Hugging Face Datasets

Kaggle

Meta (Facebook, IG, etc.) Research Access Process