Introduction to COSMOS

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• What is COSMOS useful for?

Objectives

• Understanding how we can benefit from COSMOS for our research.

• Describe COSMOS’s uses.

• Locate helpful resources to learn more about COSMOS.

Motivation

• Social media platforms have become very popular to express individuals’ opinions, experiences and to promote ideas on a daily basis.
• Twitter is a powerful data source, even with a 280 character limit, for social scientists who are trying to understand and explain the ways in which society works.
• Accessing and analysing such a powerful and extensive data source is very complicated and requires high level computational skills.
• With COSMOS, you can collect, save, analyse and visualize real-time Twitter data easily.

Features

• COSMOS currently supports gender and language detection, sentiment analysis, qualitative overview, geospatial location analysis, keyword analysis, frequency analysis and social network analysis.
• To learn more about COSMOS and its features checkout Introducing COSMOS 2.0.

Before We Start

• Request an install link from http://socialdatalab.net/COSMOS.
• Follow the Setup instructions to install COSMOS Desktop on your machine.
• To start a collection, an internet connection is needed.
• After installing and running COSMOS, it opens automatically for you.

Getting help for COSMOS

You can find out a lot more about COSMOS at http://socialdatalab.net/COSMOS and check out introduction videos at http://socialdatalab.net/instruction-videos. You can fill the form and request an install link from the website. When you request COSMOS, you will receive an email from cosmosprojectuk@gmail.com which will including the download link and links to forms to report bugs and request new features. If you ever need help using COSMOS, you can contact us via this email address. Also, if you want to stay updated about COSMOS development, you can checkout the Blogposts section from the menu.

Key Points

• COSMOS is compact, powerful and free software to collect and analyse social media data.

• It aims to democratise access to social media data for social scientists and others.