Getting started with tidytags

Considerations Related to Ethics, Data Privacy, and Human Subjects Research

Before reading through these steps for setting up tidytags, please take a few moments to reflect on ethical considerations related to social media research.

tidytags should be used in strict accordance with Twitter’s developer terms.

Although most Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) consider the Twitter data that tidytags analyzes to not necessarily be human subjects research, there remain ethical considerations pertaining to the use of the tidytags package that should be discussed.

Even if tidytags use is not for research purposes (or if an IRB determines that a study is not human subjects research), “the release of personally identifiable or sensitive data is potentially harmful,” as noted in the rOpenSci Packages guide. Therefore, although you can collect Twitter data (and you can use tidytags to analyze it), we urge care and thoughtfulness regarding how you analyze the data and communicate the results. In short, please remember that most (if not all) of the data you collect may be about people—and those people may not like the idea of their data being analyzed or included in research.

We recommend the Association of Internet Researchers’ (AoIR) resources related to conducting analyses in ethical ways when working with data about people. AoIR’s ethical guidelines may be especially helpful for navigating tensions related to collecting, analyzing, and sharing social media data.

With these things in mind, let’s get started working through two key tasks.

Key Task #1. Making sure your TAGS tracker can be accessed

A core functionality of tidytags is to retrieve tweets data from a Twitter Archiving Google Sheet; TAGS). A TAGS tracker continuously collects tweets from Twitter, based on predefined search criteria and collection frequency.

Here we offer a brief overview on how to set up TAGS, but be sure to read through the information on the TAGS landing page for thorough instructions on getting started with TAGS.

We recommend using TAGS v6.1.

You will be prompted to Make a copy of TAGS that will then reside in your own Google Drive space. Click the button to do this.

Your TAGS tracker is now ready to use! Just follow the two-steps of instructions on the TAGS tracker:

tidytags is set up to access a TAGS tracker by using the googlesheets4 package. One requirement for using googlesheets4 is that your TAGS tracker has been “published to the web.” To do this, with the TAGS page open in a web browser, go to File >> Share >> Publish to the web.

The Link field should be ‘Entire document’ and the Embed field should be ‘Web page.’ If everything looks right, then click the Publish button.

Next, click the Share button in the top right corner of the Google Sheets window, select Get shareable link, and set the permissions to ‘Anyone with the link can view.’