Post-event Report

SHORT COURSE: SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS WITH FACEBOOK DATA

 Date: 3rd & 4th May 2021

Time: 2:00pm – 6:15pm* (SGT)

Written by Chai Jia Hui

Summary

In the first week of May, HIPER organized a two-day short course with a focus in Social Media Analytics using Facebook data, offering a change in the flavour of the courses that are usually conducted. The course was led by Dr Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar, who is a Senior Research Fellow at the school. Dr Aravind earned his PhD in Information Studies, a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management and completed his bachelor’s degree in Information Technology.

The course has attracted people from different countries such as Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, and Japan.

What is Social Media Analytics (SMA)?

SMA is a development of systems, models and algorithms to gain insights of users and user-generated content in social media. Social media platforms fully rely on user-generated content. It is an online reflection of real world with public, government and companies as the actors and their interactions as the relations. Data generated from social media platforms can be used for SMA include content published by users/accounts, size and growth of users/account network (followers), interactions between users/accounts and so on. SMA is able to undertake a systematic approach to analyse and explain the phenomena with massive publicly available data on the social media platforms.

Overview of the course

The course was designed in different segments: lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises. The topics covered during the two-day course include introduction to SMA, the applications and research areas of SMA, methodologies and approaches of different phases of SMA, and affective computing (sentiments and emotion analyses). The days started off with lectures to lay a foundation for the participants. Dr Aravind also shared some practical examples to deepen participants’ understanding. Through the interactive Q&A sessions, participants were able to gain more insights on some real-life issues when doing SMA in the research setting such as the ethnics approval, methodology for publication standard and so on. This was followed by demonstration of the steps required for the SMA. The demonstrations offered a clear guidance for the hands-on exercises scheduled in the last session of both days. Participants were exposed to several software or tools, namely, Facepager, R/RStudio, and Google Colab during the exercise sessions. Participants with varying levels of experience with the tools successfully completed the tasks with the step-by-step tutorial guides provided and helps from teaching assistants.

Apart from the lectures and exercises, Dr Aravind presented a case study using Ministry of Health Singapore Facebook page to compare with the Facebook pages of public health authorities (PHAs) from the United States, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Public Health England from the United Kingdom in terms of their COVID-19 outreach and engagement before and during COVID-19 pandemic. Besides, the study was also sought to find out the sentiments and emotions of the Facebook users in response to the COVID-19 related posts by PHAs. This case study was published in a peer-reviewed journal to show case the potential of SMA in public health research (1).

Participants’ feedback

“As a doctor with limited experience in programming, I found the workshop to be a valuable introduction to available tools and use cases. Practical exercises complemented the overview given on affective computing and social media analytics in general. I really liked how we got to do hands-on exercises soon after seeing the demonstrations. The instructor patiently explained the steps and it was easy to ask questions because of the low student-to-facilitator ratio.”

“The course is a good primer for those who are interested to understand how social media analytics can be employed for public health…”

“Workshop was very informative with a dedicated time provided for you to practice using the Softwares introduced with the guidance of instructors which I feel helped the most. Very useful and recommended for researchers who studies on social media analytics!”

Reference

1. Sesagiri Raamkumar A, Tan S, Wee H. Measuring the Outreach Efforts of Public Health Authorities and the Public Response on Facebook During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Early 2020: Cross-Country Comparison. J Med Internet Res. 2020 May 19;22(5):e19334. DOI: 10.2196/19334. PMID: 32401219; PMCID: PMC7238862.