A case study of collecting dynamic social data: The pro-ana twitter community

Abstract

The study of social processes in on-line social media content is a relatively new and rapidly growing endeavour. Many social media platforms provide a public API (Application Programming Interface) which can be used for the targeted collection of data from perceived communities, however existing software for this purpose focusses on a â snapshotâ of the community and its communications, and ignores im- portant aspects of its dynamics. We present a data collection system designed to capture tweets and the dynamics of Twitter user profile and friend/follower lists, and an approach to identify a set of tags or keywords that define an on-line community. This approach and system were used to collect a data set spanning 2 years and 7 months (including 3 Christmas periods) from the â pro-anaâ (pro-anorexia) and eating disorder Twitter community.