Today I'm going to be showing you a quick, easy way for you to be able to
download and extract Facebook data. So the first thing you're going to do is
go to facebook.com, and you're going to open your page.
So for example, this is my page. And then your going to go up here and
type in the word Netvizz. This is going to pull up an app that will
allow you to be able to use and extract Facebook data.
So we're going to select this app, and because I've used it before then it's
going to take me right in, but it will be asking you to be able to go ahead.
So what you'll see is that we've got Netvizz pulled up here, and this is
going to allow us to extract data from different sections of Facebook for our
research purposes. Alright.
So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to be, not choosing my own personal network,
but I'm going to be choosing a group network.
And we'll be selecting a group in just a moment.
You could also choose pages. For example, if there's pages that you
have participated in, you can look at previous posts.
And so what I'm going to do is we're, should note that retrieve comments for
pages are limited to 800 per post because of the API.
And so what we're going to do is go ahead and choose a group.
So, for example, in this case I'm going to choose the Clintonville Crime
and Block Watch Monitor, and I want to extract the friendship connections.
So we're going to go ahead and press that button, and it's going to go through a
process of Netvizz operating and pulling that data for us.
This will take a couple of minutes, so be patient.
You'll see that this is in fact operating.
Okay, what you see is that it is retrieving users.
So we've got the number of users that are being retrieved.
As you'll see, it takes a while, but eventually all of the connections will be
pulled up. In this case there are 1,857 connections.
And so what will happen is that it has created these notes and edges, and we're
going to get a file, it's a GDF file. So we're going to right-click, and save
this, and what will we what we will be doing is saving this with a name that we
can understand. For example, this one is the Clintonville
Crime Group. And you can save it to a location on your
computer, and that's all you have to do. What will happen is that we're going to
show you next week how to use this file that you have downloaded.
If you want to look at multiple neighborhoods or multiple organizations,
you can go ahead and repeat this process, and then we'll be able to conduct an
analysis in next week's class. And next week I will be able to analyze
the connections, the friendship connections, between people that are
participating in this Clintonville Crime and Block Watch Monitor group.
So these are all people who live in my community, and we'll see how we're
interrelated.
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