Showcase

Focus on 4CAT

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Background

Ths showcase has two different goals:

1. Exemplary presentation of the collection of Reddit data using the RedditExtractoR package
2. Importing and analyzing the data collected with the 🐈🐈 4CAT 🐈🐈 (Peeters & Hagen, 2022) tool.

Data collection with RedditExtractor

Reddit Extractor is an R package for extracting data out of Reddit. It allows you to:

• find subreddits based on a search query
• find a user and their Reddit history
• find URLs to threads of interest and retrieve comments out of these threads

Disclaimer

Unfortunately, the functions of the RedditExtractoR package can NOT be executed during the Markdown creation process and must be reproduced “live”.

Therefore, there will be no output for the next two paragraphs.

Example: Find subreddits

Similar to the example from the seminar, the function find_subreddits identifies all subreddits that contain the keyword news either in their name or in their attributes.

library(tidyverse)
library(RedditExtractoR)

# Get list of subreddits
news <- find_subreddits("news")

# Quick preview of the dataset
news %>% glimpse()

# Arrange subreddits by subscribers
news %>% 
  arrange(-subscribers) %>% 
  tibble() %>% head()

Example: Find thread URLs

# Get list of top thread urls
news_top_urls <- find_thread_urls(
  subreddit = "news", 
  sort_by = "top", 
  period = "month"
)

# Quick preview of dataset
news_top_urls %>% glimpse()
news_top_urls %>% tibble()

Analysis of collected 🐈🐈 4CAT 🐈🐈 data

A detailed description about the collection of the data (in the form of a concrete application example) can be found in the slides of the associated session.

Load data into local environment

# load packages
library(readr)
library(here)

# get data from github
musk <- read_csv(
    here("content/06-api_access-reddit/data.local/4cat-reddit_news-musk_complete.csv"))

musk_entities <- read_csv(
  here("content/06-api_access-reddit/data.local/4cat-reddit_news-musk-named_entities.csv"))

# Anonymization of potentially sensitive information
musk_hash <- musk %>% 
  mutate(
     across(c(
       thread_id:id,
       body, author:post_flair,
       parent), 
       ~ v_digest(.)))

# quick preview
musk_hash %>% glimpse()

Rows: 4,838
Columns: 16
$ thread_id      <chr> "fa3188370daf15e630f9121ab7e1ff76", "e00fff6599660fbfd7…
$ id             <chr> "0427331b4ed6b36be917779e839c732f", "9465790a781133af6b…
$ timestamp      <dttm> 2022-11-14 00:13:59, 2022-11-14 01:11:53, 2022-11-14 0…
$ body           <chr> "a82402045c5afcce8e1e20c9d3d7978a", "f07ff47103d975865a…
$ subject        <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,…
$ author         <chr> "736bbd33d9055a81d41f1f0aa12859c2", "89a6bdaaa7351e189a…
$ author_flair   <chr> "9c63023a4dad721af7dc04902c9ddecb", "9c63023a4dad721af7…
$ post_flair     <chr> "9b09f05e8ca418b2b85266625985528b", "9b09f05e8ca418b2b8…
$ domain         <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,…
$ url            <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,…
$ image_file     <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,…
$ image_md5      <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA,…
$ subreddit      <chr> "worldnews", "news", "news", "news", "news", "news", "n…
$ parent         <chr> "e1ef5b33cbd8891c1a005cf5521d1408", "e342d97798ff809247…
$ score          <dbl> 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1…
$ unix_timestamp <dbl> 1668384839, 1668388313, 1668391383, 1668391676, 1668391…

musk_entities %>% glimpse()

Rows: 3,633
Columns: 3
$ word   <chr> "musk", "twitter", "twitter", "elon musk", "tesla", "trump", "t…
$ entity <chr> "PERSON", "PERSON", "PRODUCT", "PRODUCT", "ORG", "ORG", "GPE", …
$ count  <dbl> 1147, 861, 479, 404, 345, 273, 222, 218, 205, 187, 154, 132, 13…

Messages including ‘musk’ over time

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Total

library(lubridate)
library(sjPlot)

# Display 
musk %>% 
  mutate(date  = as.factor(date(timestamp))) %>% 
  plot_frq(
    date,
    title = "Post including 'musk' on Reddit") +
  labs(subtitle = "Subreddits 'news' & 'worldnews' between 14-11 and 26-11-2022")

By subreddit

library(magrittr)

musk %>% 
  mutate(
    date  = as.factor(date(timestamp)),
    across(subreddit, as.factor)
    ) %$% 
  plot_grpfrq(
    date,
    subreddit,
    title = "Post including 'musk' on Reddit") +
  labs(subtitle = "Between 14-11 and 26-11-2022")

References

Peeters, S., & Hagen, S. (2022). The 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit: A Modular Tool for Transparent and Traceable Social Media Research. Computational Communication Research, 4(2), 571–589. https://doi.org/10.5117/ccr2022.2.007.hage