Working with Reddit data
| Dates: | 22 September 2025 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 15:00 |
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| What is it: | Workshop |
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| Organiser: | Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research |
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| How much: | Free |
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This free workshop will introduce the fundamentals of natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis, using Reddit as a case study for social media research. We will explore the ethical and legal considerations of working with publicly available online data and discuss best practices for responsible and reproducible research.
The session will provide a step by step walk-through of how to preprocess and explore Reddit data using both Excel and Python. No prior programming experience is required. We will start with core concepts before moving into more technical demonstrations.
The session will conclude with a Q&A segment, allowing time for questions and discussion.
Optional hands-on participation: Attendees who wish to follow the live data scraping exercise are encouraged to set up a validated Reddit account. Basic familiarity with Excel or Python will be helpful but is not essential.
This workshop is aimed at beginners and anyone interested in analysing social media data. It will start with non-technical concepts. Accessing data from social media is a technical process that usually requires Python but datasets will be provided for attendees to explore themselves. We will also show how to analyse this data using Excel for those who don’t program. While Python isn’t required, some familiarity with it is recommended.
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