AoIR 2015: Some Notes ahead of the Digital Methods Pre-Conference Session

It's that time of the year when everything else stops and the international community of Internet researchers assembles for the annual AoIR conference. This time we're in Phoenix – arguably the warmest location AoIR has held its conference to date, and a trend very much worth continuing. I have a particularly good reason for coming to the conference this year – in addition to the usual programme of keynotes and presentations, my colleagues have seen fit to elect me as Vice-President of the Association of Internet Researchers, and I'm humbled by the honour of being able to help AoIR continue to flourish.

We start this year's conference with the pre-conference events, and here the QUT Digital Media Research Centre has put together a one-day research methods workshop which has turned out to be popular beyond expectations – with around 100 attendees for this workshop alone, we've had to make some last-minute adjustments to the format and programme of the event. Some of what could have worked as hands-on elements will now need to turn into methods demos, and this goes especially for my workshop on analysing Twitter data, gathered with TCAT, by using Tableau and Gephi.

To help those who are coming to the workshop, as well as those who were unable to attend but are curious about the methods and approaches I've covered, here I'm sharing some basic workshop notes. These aren't especially polished, but if you are running a current version of TCAT on your own server and have tracked and exported some Twitter data from it, you should be able to follow the steps outlined in the guide and begin taking your own steps towards social media analytics.