ENVI 40 - Critical Thinking and Evidence-Based Reasoning for the Environment (Martin, Winter 2025): Social Media Data

The UCSB Library DREAM Lab supports a number of tools for acquiring and analyzing social media data. Feel free to schedule a consultation if these guides do not answer your questions. You can request a remote or in-person consultation by emailing dreamlab@library.ucsb.edu.

• Social Media Data
  There are a number of tools that the UCSB Library supports to examine a variety of platforms. Use this Speciality Software Request to request access to tools.
• NCapture
  A Chrome browser plug-in that will capture Tweets in a format usable in NVIVO qualitative data analysis software. Download NCapture from the Chrome store.
• Text Data Mining Workshops
  Social media data analysis can be considered a type of text data mining. The Library has a variety of other sources of texts that can be mined, and API's that can be used to compile your own full-text datasets. There are occasional workshops offered by the DREAM Lab. 

There are also online sources of pre-existing datasets:

• Document the Now has a catalog of more than 100 datasets totaling more than 4 billion tweet ID's.
• Internet Archive
  • Nipsey Hussle death tweet archive
  • Obama White House Twitter Archives
    Separate files for @potus, @flotus, and @whitehouse
• The University of North Carolin has posted archived tweets from Confederate monument protests in 2017, 18, 19 and 20.