OSoMe: the IUNI observatory on social media

1 The study of social phenomena is becoming increasingly reliant on big data from on2 line social networks. Broad access to social media data, however, requires software 3 development skills that not all researchers possess. Here we present the IUNI Observa4 tory on Social Media, an open analytics platform designed to facilitate computational 5 social science. The system leverages a historical, ongoing collection of over 70 billion 6 public messages from Twitter. We illustrate a number of interactive open-source tools 7 to retrieve, visualize, and analyze derived data from this collection. The Observatory, 8 now available at osome.iuni.iu.edu, is the result of a large, six-year collaborative effort 9 coordinated by the Indiana University Network Science Institute. 10 PeerJ Preprints | https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2008v1 | CC-BY 4.0 Open Access | rec: 29 Apr 2016, publ: 29 Apr 2016

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