DMI-TCAT: overview of analytical modules
Channel: Digital Methods Initiative
Date: 2015-06-01

Learn how to use DMI-TCAT to capture and analyse tweets collected via the Twitter API.

Video by Erik Borra

Download and install DMI-TCAT from https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/dmi-tcat

The Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (DMI-TCAT) is a set of tools to retrieve and collect tweets from Twitter and to analyze them in various ways. It is written mostly in PHP and runs in a webserver (LAMP) environment. On a Ubuntu or Debian machine, installation can be done with one command.

DMI-TCAT provides robust and reproducible data capture and analysis, and interlinks with existing analytical software. Analytical features are based on two main ideas:

captured datasets can be refined in different ways (search queries, exclusions, date range, etc.) and
the resulting selections of tweets can be analyzed in various ways, mainly by outputting files in standard formats (CSV for tabular files and GEXF for network files)

The following paper explains the rationale behind the tool and introduces some of the analytical possibilities. Please reference it when using DMI-TCAT for academic publications.

Erik Borra, Bernhard Rieder, (2014) "Programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing tweets", Aslib Journal of Information Management, Vol. 66 Iss: 3, pp.262 - 278. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/AJIM-09-2013-0094

Further Information
 • Installation Guide https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/dmi-tcat/wiki/Installation-Guide/
 • FAQ https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/dmi-tcat/wiki/FAQ/
 • Credits
 • Follow http://twitter.com/dmitools for updates on DMI-TCAT