webreport

An R package for reporting on social media data

Prerequisites

To use the package you need both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Java SE Runtime Environment (1.8 or above). - Downloads page -

Installation

The package can be installed by copying and pasting the following lines of code and executing them in the R console

if (!requireNamespace("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("NESREA/webreport")

Data collection

To collect social media data, all you need to do is to tell R what you're looking for and where you want to store whatever data is sent. The data are stored as an SQLite database and each category of data is stored in a separate database table.

# Example for getting data on a particular term
# The database is created if previously non-existent
library(webreport)
download_all_data("nesreanigeria", "C:/Users/Admin/Documents/nesrea.db")

There are functions that optionally allow downloads from specific platforms e.g. download_fb(), download_tweets() and download_website(). (For now, these functions are designed for NESREA specific activity, but they do provide some support generic searches and downloads.)

Report generation

To build a report provide the path to the data source as an argument to build_webreport().

build_webreport("path/to/sqlite/file")

By default, a filename will be generated for the report, exclusively in MS Word. To supply a custom filename, pass a second argument to the function, for example

build_webreport("mydatabase.db", "Report1.docx")

To find out about other functions in the package, check the documentation via

help(package = 'webreport')